Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

Interesting article, and I look forward to the other 2 parts. This was well-researched and balanced.

MongoDB​ feels like a different product to what it was when the hype was high. The company, leadership and engineering quality certainly have changed.

Someone else commented about the HN bias, which we can't deny exists.

I've been running an 1-member replica for as long as I could figure out how replicas work. So I've had my Mongo database running for the last 5 years. It's met the sweet spot that I was looking for when I knew less than what I do today.

Even if one were to rubbish the product, it still has value as the company seems to be doing well (even with the negative sentiment and press). Mongo sometimes feels like how "corporates" (at least in the recent past) feel about open-source. Dealing with our SAS account at work, the sentiment used to be that open-source was a waste of our time. Open-source is brittle and slow, rather use Oracle, etc. SAP HANA will change your life, in-memory is hard, our "appliances" run on unsecular hardware ...

Those sentiments have changed over time, so we shouldn't eternally write things off if they're healthily maintained.

I look forward to mixing SQL and NoSQL well into my future. DocumentDB wouldn't be what it is today if there was no Mongo . The SQL vs NoSQL flame wars get us nowhere to be frank.

There were so many blog posts about how MongoDB was the future and SQL/relational dbs were the past.

I wish someone would collect all the hyped up tech blog posts so that we always have a reference to be able to say, "see what hype does?" Sadly, I think it would only increase the number of devs saying, "Not this time, it's different."

Hype and lack of critical thinking abolutely had their role, but mostly because it's so much easier than a relational db.

Relational db's are hard. You have schemas and query planners and the truth is, you have to take care of every single query. Every query counts.

The same query can take 30 seconds, or 30 milliseconds to run, depending on it using an index or not. You think it's ok for it to take 2 or 3 seconds, until it hits production and halts the server.

Mongo doesn't have any of that. Just load and dump json back and forth, which is perfect for fast prototyping.

Who cares about data integrity or technical debt?

MongoDB is an interesting database for sure. It seems that they made a deliberate product decision to optimize developer experience and ease of use over things like consistency and database joins. Frankly, I think it's working pretty well for their business.

I don't think there's anything that should immediately preclude the use of MongoDB in a production environment. I personally wouldn't use older versions of it as a single source of truth, but there are definitely some great use cases for it, such as allowing developers who only know JavaScript to write non-critical backend services.

People seem to forget that database consistency is not binary, but residing on a spectrum. Like any other trade-offs, you should carefully measure the costs and benefits for your particular situation before making a decision.

I don't know. I was just in a meeting where a team announced that they would need a ton of money and time to move off of MongoDB. The VP reminded them of when they had chosen to move to MongoDB years ago and asked them what happened to all of their promises about how great MongoDB would be. They responded that the promise of MongoDB and the reality are very different and MongoDB has turned out to be a disaster.