Seems to me if you use commercial DB software, the price automatically goes up. What’s one of the biggest complaints about Roon? Costs too much. That’s not a good option for the developers.
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There’s open-source software that reliably supports millions of users and the internet relies on plenty of it.
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One can only temporarily use the’latest’ DB technology.
New ones are becoming available, if no tomorrow, most definitely in the future.
Companis will only switch to a ‘newer’ software infrastructure, when there are enough development requirements that cannot be dealt with in a reasonable way.
Most of the time (if not all ) this goes together with a complete revision of the product, and/or even a complete new product.
Dirk
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But is it the right tool for the job?
I think the database choice is fine.
What I don’t understand is why so many go to the trouble of joining an on-line community for software they despise. Sign of the times, I suppose. 
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I’m not familiar with the Roon software architecture but for increased flexibility they should evolve search to its own component rather than querying the database. Many good open source search options out there like elastic search. The downside would be increased hardware resource requirements.
Updating the database is the only area where Roon occasionally performs slowly for me. The designers know it too because it is handled gracefully with a message saying it can take awhile and will continue to try in the background.
That is so so so so true.
(And I’ve done it myself, so my head nodding is partly pot calling kettle, though I hope not apropos Roon)
Seriously, people saying Open Source is not for critical computing do not know what they are talking about. Lets take Linux. SAP is running Linux. Oracle is Running Linux. 99.4% of worlds super computers are running Linux. RedHat made their whole business on supporting open source platforms and developing it. More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Red Hat Linux.
The Space X Falcon use Linux in some of its flight computers.
“the relative usage of enterprise open source and proprietary software is expected to more or less flip over the next two years, as enterprise open source grows from today’s 36 percent to 44 percent.”
This was just Linux, then there is MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB etc. all of them widely used in enterprise environments. Like this: https://www.postgresql.fastware.com
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LevelDB is a fast key-value storage library written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values.
It is not a relational database, so I would assume they only use it for indexing or something. I would also assume they use something like MS SQL for the main storage.
When you want to point a finger at someone besides yourself and back that up with clauses for damages in contracts then you use commercial software.
When you want to own your own destiny then you build it yourself using a bunch of open source or cloud based (which is built from open source) software.
Commercial software licensing is a dead industry supported only by those who still believe they are safe by pointing fingers. Those companies will not survive. Own your own destiny people. 
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Linux is a great example! But RHEL is a different story cause its is commercially supported. It has its own toolchains etc.
But the list of OSS goes on. Python, GCC for language. git for code management. Blender for graphic. Oh, and Chromium and Firefox. Tensorflow, PyTorch, NumPy and SciPy for AI and computing. OpenCV for CV. They are all the essential to their industries.
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When using data that is loosely coupled, i would choose a database that is not relational.
My choice would be a NoSQL variant like Neo4J, Arangodb or the likes.
But … i do not know anything about Roon infrastructure and backend architecture so it is just guessing.
Roon HQ is the place they know all about Roon, i trust they know what they are doing.
So, go on and do it … go go go Roon!
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I’m not convinced this is especially relevant. That report was written in 2014 and references ‘older’ file systems, which I suspect are now mostly defunct.
I love this thread! It has made my day! People applying decades old Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) and others being triggered!
I believe the CTO of Roon to be a pretty sharp cookie and probably defined requirements of what the product needs today and well into the future. Then they likely did an Alternatives Analysis and then a proof of concept with a minimum viable product (all guesses here).
I would love to hear more about Roon’s tech specifics but for any of us to recommend alternatives is silly, yet entertaining!
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Only thing to keep in mind / be aware of with this comment is that “Roon” didn’t start from nothing. It’s Meridian Sooloos (and blatantly so when looking at the logs). “Meridian Sooloos” was the product acquired from Sooloos by Meridian in 2008. Roon is a spin-out from Meridian when Meridian shutdown the Sooloos program internally. Some of the Roon folks were the original Sooloos crew. They have been doing this a lot longer than most people realize.
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LevelDB seems like a high performance hard to use DB, performance wise it’s amazing when compared to similar file based DBs like SQLite. The advantage of having it embedded in the Roon binary rather than having to connect to a 3rd party service seems like a good idea. If they use it properly I don’t see why it would be a bad DB. If users set backups properly they lose at most a couple days of library changes which seems to be an acceptable thing.
I guess if they start to see spreaded frequent failures they will change to something else. My guess is that it has been working fine for them.
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I guess you haven’t noticed the inordinate (IMO) number of corrupted libraries that are reported on this forum and that are blamed on power outages.
I think there is still a problem.
That would be a huge undertaking.
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I love this thread! It has made my day! People applying decades old Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) and others being triggered!
I for one will say I’m totally getting triggered by the idea that “ASP.NET & MS-SQL >> all open source software”. Thank you for pointing it out to me though, you’re totally right. And it’s kind of hilarious.
As for the rest, I totally agree. This is a debate we can possibly know nothing about. So I’m really glad we made your day! 
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I have had a first share of power outages none of caused my database to go tits up.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of instances of that being a possible cause, per Roon support.