One of the trends of the last ten years has been for many developers to try and avoid using a relational database where possible. Some look to NoSQL data stores, and others even consider flat file type stores of JSON or other formats that allow developers to work with speed and agility. Quite often it seems that applications grow to require some sort of relational store, often as an additional data store.

I ran across an article from a data science and analysis developer that is often performing work in R or Python on datasets. At some point, the post notes that when your dataset(s) become larger than memory, you might want to consider using a local database of some sort.

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