If you really wanna break your brain, go play with clickhouse sometime. It's more-or-less SQL, but it doesn't have transactions, so every insert is final. Also you can't really delete, but you can sort of update by inserting another row and having the engine (eventually) merge them... But you can't rely on the merge to happen immediately, so all of your queries have to grab potentially multiple versions of a row and merge them in the query... But for all of that pain, you get a database that is BLISTERINGLY fast. I built a block explorer with that, had something like an 800mn row main table, and it ran (for a while) on an old laptop.