Come on, we all know why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs&list=PLmGAf2A36C...
Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
11–20 of 164 posts
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#12What NoSQL databases are people using today when they need something ACID compliant? CouchDB?
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#13This post makes the assumption that MongoDB isn't doing well based on Hacker News. MongoDB the company, and product, are doing extremely well (outside of anecdotal Hacker News posts), based on objective metrics like downloads, skills, jobs, and company revenue (and the company is nearing 900 employees on linkedin). To put it another way, RethinkDB did extremely well on Hacker News. Twitter didn't, if you remember all…
MongoDB is like the PHP of databases. I started programming PHP and currently I bash it every time I can, because it is a terrible language. But it is easy to start and do cool stuff, just like mongodb. Initial traction is more important than initial architecture, I guess.
What? Cuz it "sucks"? We all hate PHP, but it works as advertised. I don't agree with the comparison.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#14I still think MongoDB is a good database. Conceptually, It's not as good as RethinkDB but it's not too far off. It's good to not have to deal with SQL and horrible ORMs anymore.
TBH, I'd rather write SQL directly rather than use an ORM though. I never want to use an ORM ever again. At least that's one problem that MongoDB solved.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#15Mongo succeeded for three reasons:
1. Architecturally is was very familiar to traditional relational systems like MySQL. Meaning classical master/slave, sharding and absolute consistency via locks.
2. Mongo's rise coincided with the rise of NodeJS and continued on the success of Ruby on Rails.
3. Mongo has done a phenomenally fantastic job attracting developers with exceptional documentation and getting started materials.
These all combined into a perfect storm attracting legions of developers. Note that these things have absolutely nothing to do with the technical capabilities of Mongo as an actual database.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#16Back in 2012 I worked at a startup and we had a few backend data stores (Vertica, Postgres, Redis, Big Table, MySQL, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Hadoop).
When 10gen came along, they sold us an amazing vision. We were processing 500 million to billion social media messages a day and they sold us on this dream that we would have very fast writes, a cluster of 9 machines in master-slave-slave config for fail over. We wouldn't have to write SQL anymore (which was actually funny to watch one of our engineers try to unlearn table denormalization).
At the end of the day, it was hype. I had to stay up during multiple 2012 debates for 5 hours and flip the Mongo databases because they kept crashing. The shard key they set up for us was slightly out of balance so the data distribution was 30-30-40 and every so often, that server processing 40% of our data would jump to 50% and then knock that server offline leaving the other 2 to split 50% of the work... knocking them offline. There were also tons of replication problems all traced to write locking. At the end of the day 10gen solved one problem, but our company traded that solution for other problems.
That experience taught me that you really need to understand what you're trying to solve before picking a database. Mongo is great for some things and terrible for others. Knowing what I know now, I would have probably chosen Kafka.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#17This post makes the assumption that MongoDB isn't doing well based on Hacker News. MongoDB the company, and product, are doing extremely well (outside of anecdotal Hacker News posts), based on objective metrics like downloads, skills, jobs, and company revenue (and the company is nearing 900 employees on linkedin). To put it another way, RethinkDB did extremely well on Hacker News. Twitter didn't, if you remember all…
> objective metrics like downloads, skills, jobs, and company revenue
Downloads can be repeats, no? How to discern real number of productive installs?
Skills aren't objective, are they?
Revenue, great...but they won't disclose it.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#18The misplaced hype cycle is real. 10gen is not a company dedicated to databases, at least not if the initial code quality of MongoDB is a signal (and it should be, since if you know a thing or two about storage you wouldn't take the compromises it initially did) Unfortunately, many fresh graduates with no experience in storage decided to evaluate the technology based on its very visible merits, without considering th…
Why wouldn't you always use something that is tried-and-true? MongoDB is relatively new compared to something like postgresql or even mysql.
If you think that every tried-and-true database is slower to develop against.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#19This post makes the assumption that MongoDB isn't doing well based on Hacker News. MongoDB the company, and product, are doing extremely well (outside of anecdotal Hacker News posts), based on objective metrics like downloads, skills, jobs, and company revenue (and the company is nearing 900 employees on linkedin). To put it another way, RethinkDB did extremely well on Hacker News. Twitter didn't, if you remember all…
MongoDB is like the PHP of databases. I started programming PHP and currently I bash it every time I can, because it is a terrible language. But it is easy to start and do cool stuff, just like mongodb. Initial traction is more important than initial architecture, I guess.
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Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#20The misplaced hype cycle is real. 10gen is not a company dedicated to databases, at least not if the initial code quality of MongoDB is a signal (and it should be, since if you know a thing or two about storage you wouldn't take the compromises it initially did) Unfortunately, many fresh graduates with no experience in storage decided to evaluate the technology based on its very visible merits, without considering th…
Why wouldn't you always use something that is tried-and-true? MongoDB is relatively new compared to something like postgresql or even mysql.
The hope is that new technologies would provide some advantage, like prototyping speed. That was certainly true of Ruby on Rails, for example, back when it was the new kid on the block and the "tried and true" frameworks were stuff like Struts or Spring. Yes, that's not a database technology example.