Databases are a major factor in modern applications. There are at least two major axes along which you have to decide when choosing a database: SQL vs. NoSQL, and open source vs. proprietary. What considerations should you keep in mind when choosing? Baron Schwartz, who has long been active in the MySQL community and is the author of numerous blog posts and a book about MySQL performance tuning, gave this talk at Google in February 2014, in which he discussed the considerations that go into database choices. Even if you prefer a different database, it’s useful and interesting to hear the considerations that a MySQL veteran brings to the table, and how he sees the current state of the database world.