While we are here. I know HN hates mongo. But lemme ask this question, what are the things in which mongo is better than postgres?
Subtle data loss...
Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
101–110 of 427 posts
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not overhyped, definitely not as much as old school RDBMS stuff. It's just most engineers can't make good database choices no matter what database they choose. Or more generally they can't make good infrastructure choices, as those are out of their competence and are mostly about things like operations and distributed systems, that take a long time and a lot of experience to get to a level of good decisions.
You cannot be old-school and hype. That's the reason why it is old school. And the people who can't make good database design choices are exactly the kind of people who should be using SQL. Postgres knows how to optimize and plan queries efficiently based on the actual distributions of values in your dataset. These poor choosers should be doing that... by hand? https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/planner-optimizer.htm…
This is what I'm talking about. You think that some feature that makes performance unpredictable is that important. While it's the last thing you should care about.
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#103Specific 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.
It's not their main platform though:
> Digital Blog
> A blog by the Guardian's internal Digital team. We build the Guardian website, mobile apps, Editorial tools, revenue products, support our infrastructure and manage all things tech around the Guardian
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Old versions of mongo were very bad. We accured lots of downtime due to mongo. But later versions were rock solid and I've matainer mongo installations at many startup and SMEs once you setup alertd for disk/memory usage, off you go. Works like charm 99% of the times.
MogoDB is proof that with the right strategy, marketing and luck, you really can fake it until you make it. Not that that's really a surprise or was unknown, it's just fairly new to see in the open source ecosystem instead of the enterprise one.
I'd posit its more a matter of maturing a new paradigm. There's a lot more edge cases you have to cover as NoSQL became more popular for production-at-scale.
SQL has decades of production maturation, and has wider domain knowledge.
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#105The 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…
People realized a lot of the claimed not only SQL offerings were actually no SQL at all. It turns out it is nice to have those extra features of NoSQL as well as a more traditional RMDS instead of just the NoSQL parts.
Also, the RDBMS world is full of some of the oldest scaling experts in the yellow pages. It's interesting how surprised people were that many of the "traditional" RDBMS were able to catch up on some of the scaling support that were the biggest advertised advantages of NoSQL.
It's interesting because I feel like the NoSQL world spent a lot of time reinventing the RDBMS from the "opposite direction". For all its faults, SQL is a fascinating language because it mostly ignores low level details of how the database scales, how it operates under the hood. It's not that SQL is intrinsically hard to scale (certainly at the relational algebra roots it shouldn't be hard, in theory), but it certainly leaves a lot of work to anyone building a database engine to figure out what/when/why/how to scale. I feel like a lot of RDBMS' query analyzers/planners resemble things like HBase a lot more than folks realize.
It's great that NoSQL realized that sometimes those "low level details" in an SQL engine are useful in their own ways, and have increased the spectrum of performance versus power/flexibility trade-off options. But it shouldn't be that big of a surprise that SQL databases remain competitive in that trade-off space, given under the hood they've had to think about a lot of that stuff over many decades.
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#106Kudos to The Guardian for publishing this article on their top-level domain. It looked identical to one of their news articles (including ads). Only the content (excellent writeup) was different. Many tech companies silo their engineering teams writings into a “tech” part of their website. If this wasn’t an ad for The Guardian’s technology team, I think it could be. Putting the engineering team’s content in the same article CMS as the news articles is a small decision that reflects highly on The Guardian’s publishing organization.
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#107The 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…
I found it a little funny that NoSQL started becoming popular during at least some of the same years that static typing starting becoming popular (again).
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#108I never got around to using Mongo as my main doc db because it was incredibly hard to find a management tool. I now use json supported functions in SQL Server and do not have the need for a different type of database. SQL Server handles my small 'documents db' implementation with the infrastructure of a RDMS. Win win for me. To me Mongo just got popular by mistake way too early. It's like having a celebrity retweet y…
I don't have any links to prove my point but I suspect we need to thank Mongo for pushing the traditional SQL databases to support JSON.
I think the fact that the Cosmos DB "document db" API clones the MongoDB API, of all the available options, is a link in that chain.
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.” — Larry Ellison
This actually resonates with me, maybe not in the way Ellison intended as I’m not familiar with the context he said it in. A bit off the main topic but the more I revert to just using emacs for some task I previously used a .app bundle or web page for, the more I question how much we the computer industry has just been spinning its wheels for the last 30+ years. I honestly can’t really tell what value WIMP-centric GU…
> I suspect that in a year I’ll be using what is effectively an Elisp machine with an Apple logo paired with an iPhone.
It's been working for me for quite a while now. And it's depressing, but here we are.
Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
#110The 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…
Even large organization like Guardian can have some cheep tech team who rush for such a poor choice? Also dumb for management to let it happen.