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Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

theguardian.com

191–200 of 427 posts

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#191
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a serious note, there are occasionally situations where I have to take in a lot of data that I know nothing about. Sooner of the time this data is either in json or readily convertible to json so losing it into a mongodb database and poking around in it is a reasonable preliminary step to whatever the more permanent solution should be.

Would PostgreSQL + JSONB work for you there?

I assume it could, but haven't tried it.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#192
Good read. Although I don’t quite understand why every few years media companies keep rewriting their content management layer which generally has no impact on company’s top line or bottom line whatsoever. How can these type of investments are justified when all you are doing is recreating exactly same APIs with same data. Am I missing something here?

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#194
post #70

Earlier 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…

Discoverability and self documentation is generally the advantage of GUI systems. Well built systems can be understood in a few moments without needing to consult a manual. That's almost impossible in a pure CLI environment.

Of course it's entirely possible to screw this up, modern phone-centric design standards are really bad about it for example, but in general you need to consult the manual (or Google) far less often.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#195

I 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.

FWIW and insofar as I can recollect, JSON was supported by Postgres before Mongo was a thing, and Mongo was built based on Postgres.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#197
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?

You're going to need some supporting arguments if you're actually trying to say that every document database is not worth using.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Given their employers, one would hope that they get good editorial support though!

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#199

Fantastic write up article. A few things stood out at me. In no particular order: - Going with Mongo in the first place cost them dearly. CMS are a weird application for schemaless. Not necessarily wrong, but definitely weird. I wonder if they would benefit from moving to more structured schema and I'm willing to bet a lot of the migration complexity comes from that in the first place. - God damn that is a long migra…

> CMS are a weird application for schemaless. That depends. If the CMS is managing documents that have flexible structures that are tree-like, it might not be such a horrible idea to model that structure in a document instead of relationally.

Document stores might be great for the C but not so much for the MS.

Re: Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

#200
post #183
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - if you don't know SQL and you do know JSON, postgres looks scary and Mongo looks familiar.

Saying "I don't know SQL so I will just use JSON" really misses the point though. SQL is easy. Data is hard. NoSQL products offer to get rid of SQL which includes an implication that SQL itself was the challenge in the first place. The problem then is that you have lost one of the best tools for working with data.

I dunno that SQL is exactly easy, though. It's one thing to say "select statements are essentially identical to Python list comprehensions", but in practice I still have to look up the Venn diagram chart every time I need to join anything, and performance optimization is still a dark art. I'd say SQL is easy in the same way that Git is easy: you can get away with using just 5% of it, but you'll still need to consult an expert to sort things out when things go sideways.
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