I am currently writing my doctoral thesis. Since I have collected quite a lot of data for my empirical part, which I can’t simply write together in an Excel document, I thought about putting my data for the thesis on an external database. However, there are so many databases and I am not sure which one would be the best choice.
I did some research on the internet and came across Aiven. Aiven is a provider that allows you to connect different databases. This way I wouldn’t have to choose just one database. Have any of you ever worked with Aiven? Great thing is that this Provider is cloud based so I can access my data from anywhere.
The best database choice really depends on the structure of your data, how you intend to use it, and which one best matches your experience and expertise. At the Allen Institute for Brain Science, we tend to use relational databases such as PostgreSQL for our structured data. MySQL is similar, and possibly easier to get started with. Both of these also have cloud-based versions offered by each of the major cloud platform providers.
Again, the correct data store depends on many factors that are very specific to you and your data. Excel or other file-based storage methods may also be feasible if they help you accomplish what you need to do.