What Is a Database?

A database is an organised collection of data stored and accessed electronically. It is where your product's persistent data lives, user accounts, content, transactions, settings, and everything else that needs to be saved and retrieved. Without a database, your product cannot remember anything between sessions.

The most common type is a relational database (also called SQL), which organises data into tables with defined relationships between them. PostgreSQL is the leading open-source relational database and is widely used for production web applications. Non-relational databases (NoSQL), like MongoDB, store data in more flexible formats and are suited to certain use cases like document storage or high-volume writes.

Database design, particularly the schema (the structure of tables and relationships), has long-term consequences that are often underestimated at the MVP stage. A poorly designed schema creates problems that are expensive to fix once the product has real data in it. Adding missing indexes, restructuring relationships, and handling data migrations correctly all become harder as the dataset grows.

At Toggle, we use PostgreSQL with Prisma (an ORM that provides a type-safe interface to the database) on every project. This combination is production-grade, well-documented, and makes database access both safe and efficient. We invest time in getting the schema right from the start, because it is far cheaper to design it well upfront than to refactor it after launch.