NewsBlur was down yesterday evening due to its Mongo database getting attacked by a hacker and held for ransom. It’s restored from backup, but there are privacy implications for anyone who had sensitive private data there. We will likely find out more after the maintainer recovers from a busy night.

There are no good links for this, but it’s being discussed on Hacker News. Since it’s open source, someone described what’s being kept in that database.

(I use NewsBlur, but I don’t think my RSS reading habits are all that sensitive. Others might be in a different situation, though.)

I was asked this question in an interview and I said the downsides would be extra disk space used to store it and more disk writes from the database to maintain the index on updates. I asked a friend and he said the downsides are space used in memory to store the index as well as the fact that an index could take days to build on a large dataset.

What does everyone here think about this question?

Hello everyone!

I've recently got an idea for a Database as a Service I'd like to create. The only issue is - I don't know how to create or host a database!

I've only ever used Mongoose/mLab with Javascript, and a minimal amount of Postgres with Python.

If I'm looking to create a database that will, eventually, be able to store images, songs, and videos, where should I start my homework?

I can create the backend and the frontend with no issue - just stuck on this part here. If it's of any relevance, I most frequently use the MERN stack.