Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#81

Post by virmundi » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

As a person who just recently turned down an offer to write an ArangoDB book, Mongo is not worth it. I think most needs are met between Arango and PostgreSQL. Arango provides a scalable NoSQL option over PostgreSQL (let's see what version 10 holds). PostgreSQL provides a solid, efficient SQL solution.

Mongo provides no benefits of transactions or solid design. If you want either, look to Arango or PostgreSQL.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#82

Post by tcoff91 » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

manishsharan wrote: post #64

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…

You can do NoSQL with Postgres...

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#83

Post by nir » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:01 PM UTC

Marketing aside, MongoDB is just really easy to pick up and use. In a small project, its weaknesses don't really show up (at least in my limited experience), if it gets big you often end up rebuilding anyway.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#84

Post by chx » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:01 PM UTC

For us, the reason to run with MongoDB in 2009 were twofold: a) for one of our products which was consuming the Twitter gardenhose, unverified writes were a blessing. We got away with a single dedicated server running mongodb (and it was not a particularly expensive server). I would need to do serious research again whether there's a better solution for this today. It was using Stanford NLP to highlight breaking news before anyone realized. We never got a single subscriber because every newsdesk that saw it wanted to acquire us immediately LOL. Eventually one did. b) For another, the ability to store and index complex documents which in SQL would've needed JOINs and you couldn't index across JOINs at least in MySQL and our previous experience in PostgreSQL vs MySQL support didn't favor PostgreSQL at the time at all. It worked -- although it didn't have a journal back then. We were ready for a failure but the failure never came. The landscape today is much different with PostgreSQL and MySQL and SQLite all embracing JSON storage and indexing on expressions are there for all three.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#85

Post by andred14 » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:01 PM UTC

Anyone with proper unbiased DB knowledge knows without trying or reading anything that it is hype. DBs are all about trade-offs you can't have it all

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#86

Post by takeda » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:02 PM UTC

niahmiah wrote: post #38

to avoid schema migrations

And in turn put the schema (actually multiple versions of it) in your application making it more complex.

Since Relational Algebra was invented in 1970 we were unable to find a better representation of a relational data, there were many attempts but so far they failed (except for very specialized uses). So I'm inclined to believe it's here to stay.

JSON is basically just step backwards back to the XML Database[1] and Object Oriented Database[2]. It starts falling apart as soon as your data becomes more complex (you have relations, or need to query it by something else than primary key). Having said that, I'm glad that relational databases added support to it, it perhaps might be useful in early stages when things are in flux.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_model#Object-oriented...

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#87

Post by bastijn » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:03 PM UTC

Obligatory read when talking MongoDB https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads and follow-up https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3.

Ensured me to never use this for production scenarios. No matter how 'hyped' or 'convenient' it is. Yaiks.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#88

Post by andred14 » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:03 PM UTC

Anyone with average to more DB experience knows there is no one-stop shop. DBs are about trade-offs and we need to choose the right ones for our application(s)

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#89

Post by sidlls » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:04 PM UTC

dyeje wrote: post #73

Reminds me of the keynote DHH gave at RailsConf this year. Despite the stories that we like to tell ourselves about picking the right tool for the job, we're just as prone to chasing the shiny new thing as all the other humans.

Who's "we"? I have yet to see a high quality technical argument for using a number of technologies that have come along the last 5-8 years or so in most cases. Too often "scalability" and "modern stack" are used as an excuse to tinker with the new shiny far out of bounds of their proper use. I have a reputation as being the opposition any time adoption of something new comes up. It's rarely necessary.

Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

#90

Post by jsherard » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 7:06 PM UTC

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…

You do realize it's 2017 now, right? Many things have changed in MongoDB (and in the IT world in general) during the last 5 years. MongoDB is a mature, established, full-featured database - recognized by Gartner as a "challenger" to more established RDBMS vendors like Oracle and Microsoft.

http://bit.ly/2uP3Obi