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Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

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Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#61

Post by matthewrudy »

klodolph wrote: post #46
memracom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but you can use PostgreSQL as a NoSQL and there are benchmarks showing that it outperforms MongoDB. And if you do not want to commit to either SQL or NoSQL, the PostgreSQL has you covered. You can put a JSONB column in any of your tables to handle the part of your data that is schemaless, and you can still index the data in that JSONB column. There are a very few applications that need distributed scala…

These PostgreSQL features are relatively recent. The jsonb column type dates back to 9.4, which was released in Dec 2014, less than three years ago. MongoDB had been around for well over five years by that point. There are few applications that need distributed scalability beyond what PostgreSQL can provide, but I'd argue that it's not uncommon to have problems with Oracle scalability, if you don't have deep pockets…

Postgres had hstore for a few years before that which solved similar use cases, but was only key value (no nested objects)

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#62

Post by cphoover »

joeblau wrote: post #16

Back 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 woul…

"which was actually funny to watch one of our engineers try to unlearn table --denormalization-- normalization*"

Going from sql to nosql would be denormalizing data not normalizing it so, the engineer would be unlearning table normalization.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#63

Post by takeda »

mbesto wrote: post #25

I've assessed a fair number of companies who use Mongo in some way or another and the I always ask the rationale for the decision. Surprise surprise, it's usually "we chose it because it was easy to start with". My favorite recent one was a company that had to persist their Mongo database into AzureSQL (nightly job) so they could then push it to Good Data for analytics. They could have very easily used SQL Server and…

In case of Edmunds, the rationale was that their contractors previously used Mongo and were more familiar with, and upcoming 2.6 version will have some "new cool features".

Also the table is misleading, PostgreSQL replaced Oracle, Mongo replaced Oracle Coherence[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Coherence

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#64

Post by manishsharan »

I think Enterprise folks do not appreciate the flexibility afforded by NoSQL . For my startup I started off on PostGres SQL with Hibernate and it worked great ... until we first met our paying customers. They needed data elements that I had not envisioned and so we ended up doing Schema updates.. again and again . Since we used ORM (hibernate), that also meant new hibernate code generation . After a while this became very tedious.

I have a background in enterprise s/w development; we always lock down on most of our requirements before we start writing code. RDBMS is fantastic in this scenarios. In my startup, we build something light and show it to bunch of prospects and iterate. MongoDB fits this mode of s/w development for us. Sure there are gotchas and other issues but they have not affected us yet.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#65

Post by nevi-me »

xmatos wrote: post #35

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, un…

It has most of that. It's not that RDBMS are hard and schemaless convolutions are easier.

Mongo has query planners, the same thinking you do in SQL applies to Mongo, the edge cases are different. For example, you can't have composite indices on multiple arrays. The same principles we consider when tuning our RDB apply to Mongo, normalisation comes at different forms/levels. The same applies to denormalisation. Just because there are/were "no joins" didn't mean that everything goes into a single collection.

I run some Mongo deployments, and I take as much care in understanding performance, as I do with our SQL deployments. Databases are hard to those who are unwilling to open up the manual and read. It's not only SQL.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#66

Post by sandrob57 »

threepipeproblm wrote: post #48
mattacular wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is PHP a terrible language? It powers a vast part of the internet including sites huge, tiny, and everything in between. It's in vogue to hate on PHP especially here on HN. Language hate based on some sort of popularity contest is silly and language snobbery wont be tolerated at any company worth its salt (read: NOT most startups)

This lack of insight is why PHP developers have lower average salaries than non-PHP developers. If you think PHP is looked down on by those who care about language features because of a popularity context, rather than because of asinine language decisions and limited support for modern programming paradigms, I think it's you who is missing it. Since any program can technically be written in any (Turing Complete) lang…

You're not wrong, but those articles are 5+ years old and PHP has changed A LOT in recent years — especially since the release of v7.

Still, that's not going to do much to change public perception, and I guess that's somewhat fair. PHP has earned it's reputation, even if many (but not all) criticism are now largely dated.

I'm just happy I switched to working on other languages, aside from the occasional Laravel-based side projects.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#67

Post by threepipeproblm »

sandrob57 wrote: post #66
threepipeproblm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This lack of insight is why PHP developers have lower average salaries than non-PHP developers. If you think PHP is looked down on by those who care about language features because of a popularity context, rather than because of asinine language decisions and limited support for modern programming paradigms, I think it's you who is missing it. Since any program can technically be written in any (Turing Complete) lang…

You're not wrong, but those articles are 5+ years old and PHP has changed A LOT in recent years — especially since the release of v7. Still, that's not going to do much to change public perception, and I guess that's somewhat fair. PHP has earned it's reputation, even if many (but not all) criticism are now largely dated. I'm just happy I switched to working on other languages, aside from the occasional Laravel-based…

Thanks, that is absolutely worth pointing out. But there is only so much you can do to fix languages when they are designed with problems initially and you want to keep old programs working. I have the same concerns about ES6 BTW, although JavaScript foundations are arguably less flawed overall (excepting a few areas that are just bat shit crazy).

Is public perception the reason you are happy to be mostly using something else now, though?

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#68

Post by matthewowen »

Daishiman wrote: post #3

The 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…

Have you ever worked on a significant project using MongoDB?

I did. I wouldn't use it again. But reliability just wasn't an issue. There was a time when there were insane defaults that made this an issue, but that's a long time ago.

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