Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres • Hacker News Board

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#51

Post by konschubert » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

joemccall86 wrote: post #6

Interesting article. Our stack isn't using mongo, but reading these posts give me good ideas for how others manage their software lifecycle. I like their use of a pre-production environment as a step between QA/UAT and production. This allows for a clean trial run of anything new deployed to production, as well as greatly removing any deployment-day surprises.

We call it our "canary". :D

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#52

Post by harel » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

elevenworth wrote: post #11

The creator of Envoy had some choice words about Mongo a few days ago. https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status/1074717204224999427 Plenty of people here like to dish on Mongo and the product seems to have been re-architected a few times since I used it seven years ago. By what metrics can we say the product is one worthy of passing a HN smell test? Passing Jepsen was seemingly not enough. https://www.mongodb.com/jeps…

In my previous startup we used mongo as the main datastore (this was pre Postgres 9.4, before indexable JSONB). It worked for us, and it worked fine. I saw the mob rising up against it, but we have not had any of the problems (maybe we just read the manual and had it configured correctly?). Today my go-to is postgres of course, but I had to wait until JSONB was out to make the switch.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#53

Post by lmilcin » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

nemild wrote: post #30

The Guardian example was heavily used by MongoDB as a case study to pitch their database to others in 2011: https://www.mongodb.com/customers/guardian https://www.mongodb.com/presentations/mongodb-guardian https://www.slideshare.net/tackers/why-we-chose-mongodb-for-... And reupping my previous, three-part series on MongoDB: On MongoDB NoSQL databases were the future. MongoDB was the database for "modern" web engineer…

What really happened is people wanted something new but did not want to change the ways they DESIGN their application and processes. There is place for NoSQL but if you are going to use it as if it was SQL then you would be better served by an SQL database.

Also, I think MongoDB tried to be everything and failed to be good at anything. It offers neither stellar performance nor scalability and I guess for most projects there is not much advantage over regular SQL database. Certainly nothing to fight over when there is much more technology choices to make.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#54

Post by kokey » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

I think MongoDB has a place, but that place isn't being the database for a big distributed content store for a web site or something like that. Where I do think it has a place is for some of the in-memory data structures of a node running an application or a service. Applications tend to have a lot of data in various structures that it works with while it's running. Sometimes you need this to be persistent and sometimes you need to be able to scale this across a node. MongoDB is fine for this, so I think of it more like a SQLite replacement.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#55

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

_gi12 wrote: post #39

Document DBs are like blockchain projects - overhyped and worse than existing solutions for nearly every use case. Why do ostensibly smart engineers keep falling for this stuff?

> Why do ostensibly smart engineers keep falling for this stuff?

Review driven design is likely a large contributer. If you know you will be looking for a new job in 2 years, you better get some experience in $latestTrend instead of $provenTechnology.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#56

Post by dhd415 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #10

lykr0n wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like they wanted to run Mongo inside their own Amazon account- under their direct control. AWS could do that with Postgres while MongoDB couldn't.

That makes me sad. I would love for AWS to have a hosted Mongo solution or some type of NoSQL database besides DynamoDB. Do people use ElasticSearch as a primary data store? In my limited experience implementations don’t treat it as the source of truth.

Elastic maintains a page documenting the current status of their "resiliency" efforts on Elasticsearch:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur...

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#57

Post by perfunctory » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #42

nemild wrote: post #30

The Guardian example was heavily used by MongoDB as a case study to pitch their database to others in 2011: https://www.mongodb.com/customers/guardian https://www.mongodb.com/presentations/mongodb-guardian https://www.slideshare.net/tackers/why-we-chose-mongodb-for-... And reupping my previous, three-part series on MongoDB: On MongoDB NoSQL databases were the future. MongoDB was the database for "modern" web engineer…

Fashion driven development and not understanding how to actually make use of SQL.

Reminds me of

“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.” — Larry Ellison

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#58

Post by michelpp » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #47

pjmlp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fashion driven development and not understanding how to actually make use of SQL.

It's amazing how many insurmountable SQL performance problems can be surmounted by putting things in 3rd normal form.

That, and simply reading the documentation. N+1 problems and denormalization-by-design are a failure to understand SQL.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#59

Post by wwweston » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

_gi12 wrote: post #39

Document DBs are like blockchain projects - overhyped and worse than existing solutions for nearly every use case. Why do ostensibly smart engineers keep falling for this stuff?

For one thing, a good chunk of what happens in the industry isn't particularly well described by the term "engineering," which in my mind describes someone who is well-trained and experience-versed in relevant scientific models for the application domain and the dynamics of relevant "materials" and their interaction that can be composed into a solution. It might be the term "craft" better describes a lot of software development activity.

For another, it may be everyone is susceptible to the influence of trends. Even engineers. And the more complex the details of a subdomain of software engineering are, the bigger the tradeoff between becoming someone who can make a true engineering assessment in that niche and developing expertise elsewhere...

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#60

Post by chronotis » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:33 PM UTC

jack6e wrote: post #35

Specific technology choices aside, this was an incredible write-up of their migration process: thorough, organized, readable prose about a technical topic. It is helpful to read how other teams handle these types of processes in real production systems. Perhaps most refreshing is the description of choices made for the various infrastructure pieces, because it is reasonable and real-world. Blog posts so often describ…

This was what was particularly interesting to me - that they went to the effort of writing a purely technical article on the particulars of how parts of their environment operate, and to publish it on their platform even when that's not the sort of content they're known for.