SQL - any and all

Out of the pretty small number of database systems I've used:

• Postgres: Pretty standard choice, can't go wrong with it
• MySQL/MariaDB: Also very safe choice, I feel like it's more feature rich than Postgres but I'm not sure
• Oracle: It reeks of proprietary bloat and it's unnecessarily different than the previous two in some things, but you can get some official enteprise support if you're a company
• Influx: It solves a specific problem (time series) but it's very cool, modern and with api support for many languages
• Microsoft Excel: Obviously the best choice

Punch cards

Can't believe no one mentioned Paradox. There has to be like tens of people that use it!

Lotus Notes

Unpopular opinion probably, but Firebird has been really good to us for a couple of decades. We have thousands of users running it to provide offline data and it's been extremely reliable and trouble-free. Good support for features like stored procedures, triggers, etc. without requiring much in the way of maintenance.

My biggest complaints are that the database file size tends to bloat up with lots of transactions, and it needs a better bulk-load feature (it has an 'external table' feature that works well and that we use heavily, but it's kind of a pain). And prior to v4 it didn't have a good replication system. No idea how good the replication in v4 is.

We still have multiple systems using access in production 🤗