Programming

Yep — that is what I mean by documents, and it’s what I meant all along. The beauty of documents is how simple and flexible they are. Here’s a URL (or path), and here’s the contents of that URL. Done.

But that content is meaningless, because you just saved an arbitrary data structure. It’s not as if you can do anything with those postgres files. Or those possibly multi GB MSSQL .mdf, .ldf, .ndf documents. That’s data (a word that’s imo far clearer than document) stored in a very specific way that you need to know the exact structure of to make any sense of. It’s not usable directly in any way. Not "Done."

No, because you can’t store “literally anything” in a Postgres database.

Yes you can. You can either add space for what you need to store, or you can, again, store e.g. a JSON blob.

if you put an index on this column, inserts will be too slow, if you don’t have an index on that column selects will be too slow

Or don’t, and it will only be as slow ass a NoSQL Database …

A document is always more work in the short term

It’s the opposite, a document db is far easier in the short term, that’s why everyone jumped on them before seeing the limitations.

Yeah, a relational DB is harder because you have to have a good design, that allows you to do what you actually want to do. And if you none of your devs are good at SQL, then probably a document db is better. And yes, sometimes, you need nothing but a document DB. But I still heavily disagree that most of the time you want one.