What are the advantages and disadvantages of relational databases?

Advantages of relational databases

• Data integrity: Ensured through strict schemas and foreign keys, minimizing duplication and contradictions.
• Atomic operations (ACID): Transactions guarantee atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, which are critical for business logic.
• Standardized query language (SQL): Facilitates data exchange and manipulation across various applications and tools.
• Vertical scalability: By increasing server resources (CPU, RAM, storage).
• Mature tools and ecosystem: Wide support, well-developed administration and development tools.

Disadvantages of relational databases

• Complexity with hierarchical and graph data: Representing such structures requires additional tables and complex queries (JOINs).
• Rigid schema: Changes in data structure (schema) require migrations, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
• Limited horizontal scalability: Sharding and other horizontal scaling methods are more complex compared to NoSQL databases.
• Performance issues with very large data volumes and high load: Performance may degrade as data volume and query complexity grow.