Why I Stopped Storing Quiz Results in a Database — and What I Did Instead

When I started building PrismaTest — a multilingual psychology testing platform — I made the classic mistake: I stored every quiz result in PostgreSQL. It lasted about two weeks before I realized it was a terrible idea. The Problem PrismaTest serves 80+ psychological assessments (Big Five, MBTI, Enneagram, IQ tests, career aptitude, and more) translated into 20 languages. Users take tests without registration, get instant visual results with charts and diagrams, and share them with friends. Storing results in a database created several headaches: Privacy concerns — anonymous users don't want their psychological data stored anywhere Database bloat — thousands of test completions per day, each with 20-300 answers Sharing problem — how do you let users share results without creating accounts? GDPR compliance — storing personal psychological assessments is a liability The Solution: Encode Everything into the URL Instead of persisting results server-side, I encode the entire test state — an