I'm building a customer portal and want a database that won't be painful to operate

If your goal is “won’t be painful to operate”, the safest default for a customer portal is usually:

Recommended default: managed PostgreSQL

Use a fully managed Postgres service like:

• AWS RDS / Aurora PostgreSQL
• Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• Or a simpler hosted provider like Neon, Supabase, or Crunchy Bridge

Why Postgres is a good fit

• Reliable and mature: very well understood operationally
• Flexible: handles typical portal needs well — users, accounts, tickets, orders, settings, audit logs
• Great tooling: backups, replication, monitoring, migrations, and admin tools are all strong
• Easy hiring: lots of developers know it
• Keeps options open: you can add search, JSON fields, read replicas, etc. without switching databases

What makes it low-pain to operate

To minimize ops burden, prioritize:

1. Managed service
   Don’t self-host unless you really need to.
2. Automated backups + point-in-time recovery
3. Multi-AZ / HA if downtime matters
4. Read replicas only if needed later
5. Connection pooling if you expect lots of app connections
6. Simple schema design at first

When to choose something else

• If you mostly need simple document storage and minimal joins: MongoDB Atlas can be okay, but operationally and schema-wise it’s often less ideal for customer portals.
• If your app is tiny and you want extreme simplicity: a managed SQLite-style option can work for prototypes, but usually not a long-term portal backend.
• If you need global low-latency writes at huge scale: consider distributed SQL like CockroachDB or Spanner, but they add complexity and cost.

Practical advice

For a customer portal, I’d usually do:

• PostgreSQL
• Managed hosting
• ORM/migrations like Prisma, SQLAlchemy, Django ORM, etc.
• Cache only if needed later, e.g. Redis for sessions or rate limiting

Short answer

If you want the least painful, most boring, production-friendly choice:
Managed PostgreSQL is the best default.

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a database selection checklist,
2. a specific recommendation by cloud provider, or
3. a starter schema for a customer portal.