Yes, that was a shorthand generalization for "people who've studied computer architecture" - which most application developers never have.
> no DBA worth their salt would put database in the environment where it has to share resources with applications.
Most applications today are running on smartphones/mobile devices. That means they're running with local embedded databases - it's all about "edge computing". There's far more DBs in use in the world than there are DBAs managing them.
> mmap shouldn't be used for storage applications for other reasons. mmap doesn't allow their users to precisely control the persistence aspect... which is kind of the central point of databases. So, it's a mostly worthless tool in that context. Maybe fine for some throw-away work, but definitely not for storing users' data or database's own data.
Well, you're half right. That's why by default LMDB uses a read-only mmap and uses regular (p)write syscalls for writes. But the central point of databases is to be able to persist data such that it can be retrieved again in the future, efficiently. And that's where the read characteristics of using mmap are superior.