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Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#71
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my attitude as well. RethinkDB, in comparison, had a much better attitude of "reliable first, fast later". Unfortunately, it turned out that when you're a database, it doesn't matter how much data you lose, only how fast you are while losing it.

The PostgreSQL community is a nice counterexample - perfectly gigantic and growing marketshare, and very very reliable.

PosgreSQL is amazing, I use it everywhere. SQLite is the only other datastore I love that much.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#72
post #53

Yes. We have applications running on both PostgreSQL and MongoDB and I find that working with MongoDB is just more pleasant. I think it mostly boils down to my preference of document databases as opposed to relational ones. It feels much more natural to me to embed / nest certain properties within a document instead of spreading it across several tables and then joining everything together to get the complete data. M…

I'm curious, any chance you remember some of those json/jsonb update hassles?

(not arguing, just curious - when things get hairy in JSON, I give up on SQL and [1] I write a user defined function (CREATE FUNCTION) in JS (plv8) or Python (plpython).

[1] assuming the update code needs to run inside the database, e.g. for performance reasons... otherwise just perform your update in the application, where you presumably have a richer library for manipulating data structures...

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#74
Yes.

If we were going to start from scratch today, we'd probably use Postgres. But, realistically, the primary motivation behind that decision would be because Postgres is available on AWS, and that would centralize more of our operations. (DocumentDB is, of course available. Its not Mongo. I'd be curious to hear from people who actually had Mongo deployments and were able to move to DocumentDB; its missing so many of MongoDB's APIs that we physically can't, our applications would not run).

Mongo isn't that bad. It has limitations. You work within the limitations... or you don't. But I really don't think a valid option is "mongodb fuckin sucks m8, shit tier db". We're not going to be migrating terabytes of data and tens of thousands of lines of code when the benefit is tenuous for our business domain.

Should you use MongoDB today? I'll say No, but not for the reasons anyone else is giving. MongoDB's Cloud Provider agreement has decimated the cloud marketplace for the database. Essentially, if you want to run a version released in the past few years (4.2+), you need to be on their first-party Atlas product. Many other parties, especially the big clouds, are on 3.6 (or have compatibility products like DocumentDB/CosmosDB which target 3.6). Atlas is great. Its fairly priced and has a great UX and operations experience. But, I don't feel comfortable about there being political reasons why I couldn't change providers if that changes. If you have business requirements which demand, say, data in a specific region, or government-class infra, or specific compliance frameworks, Atlas may not be able to meet them.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#76

All of these replies are for Mongo's product 5+ years ago. MongoDB has changed A LOT since then. Has anyone used MongoDB IN THE PAST 2 YEARS ?

Why would you? The philosphy is the same even if you have better locking. It hasn't changed substantially. The only time you get schemas even are when you use it with like BI connectors. And that's just an accomodation.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#77
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, just regret and misery. Back in 2010 when the MongoDB hype was high, the well-known company where I was working at the time decided to build the next version of the product using MongoDB. I was on the analytics team and had to code a whole bunch of intricate map-reduce jobs to extract summary data out of Mongo. I'd repeatedly head to the product team and ask them to explain the edge cases I was seeing in the dat…

While there are many people here who are sharing their bad experience with MongoDB, just curious if you all find the experience with DynamoDB similar? Since they are both of the NoSQL family.

I'm curious as well, since my company is moving from Postgres to DynamoDB.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#78
I am disappointed with the direction that MongoDB took this past few years. Going ACID shows in benchmarks [1] and it’s not advisable if you are using MongoDB for stats and queue. (No one uses MongoDB for financial transactions despite the changes.)

And the recent change to a restrictive license is worrisome as well. I have been thinking of forking 3.4 and make it back to “true” open source and awesome performance. (If any C++ devs want to help out, reach out to me! username @gmail.com)

[1] https://link.medium.com/PXIeZfhhH6

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#79
Someone needs to explain to me what the benefits of NoSQL with MongoDB are when you have the JSONB column type and the ability to query and insert at the field level with JSON in PostgreSQL? Maybe there's some benefit, but I'm not seeing that major "gotta have it" feature or performance gains. And I ask this question seriously, because I just don't know the answer.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#80
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres's jsonb format is definitely not "essentially" a string. You can get native indexes on json fields in Postgres, and you can query fields however you like.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/functions-json.html they are surrounded by quotes, is that not a string ?

This is among the most shallow comment I ever saw on HN. Just because `TreeSet a = [1,2,3]` is surrounded by [ and ] does that mean `a` is a list? When you do `jsonb j = '{"a":"c"}` postgres builds a separate data structure for you from that json, which allows you to use a btree index.
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