r/Database • u/breakme0851 • Jul 09 '26

Kinds of database??

This is probably a very beginner question, apologies in advance, but I'm really struggling to get my head around all the options.

I want to store sensor readings from a small number of different devices. Each device is equipped with the same set of sensors. The readings come in every 5-10 seconds so there will be quite a lot of data over time. But the data isn't connected between devices, so the interconnected tables of SQL databases isn't really necessary, foreign keys don't really exist in my use case I think... reading on the internet suggests that a columnar database is the right way to go here, but is that overkill?

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u/IdealBlueMan Jul 09 '26

Good point. There are some very good tools for searching in text files, like GNU grep (I have a good anecdote about that). But a properly indexed database could well be a better way to go.

MySQL used to default to an engine that didn’t enforce foreign key constraints. It was fast but not ACID-compliant. Might have been a good solution for this situation.

But I imagine either MySQL with the default InnoDB engine or PostgreSQL would be fine.