Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#161

Post by daneel_w » Fri, May 22, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #149

daneel_w wrote: post #141

I can't help noticing that the majority - not all, but the majority - of "No." responses here summarize identically: someone used MongoDB a long time ago (between 5 and 11 years) and ran into a problem, so they stopped using it and will never try or re-evaluate it again. I'm a bit surprised that developers and systems engineers get burned to the point that they disconnect from the daily reality of their occupation, t…

I had to rip out a comletely schemaless mongodb and replace it with a sql DB. The data was completely relational, and developing without a schema was a pita. I asked why mongodb was used in the first place. As far as I could tell, the answer was one resume driven dev. If a document store made sense for our data then we would’ve made mongodb work. It was less “we got burned” and more “why were we using mongo in the fi…

This was a bit of a hidden point with my comment. A poor choice of tool for the job is a completely different problem than the tool being poor.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#162

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 22, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

daneel_w wrote: post #141

I can't help noticing that the majority - not all, but the majority - of "No." responses here summarize identically: someone used MongoDB a long time ago (between 5 and 11 years) and ran into a problem, so they stopped using it and will never try or re-evaluate it again. I'm a bit surprised that developers and systems engineers get burned to the point that they disconnect from the daily reality of their occupation, t…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#163

Post by sgift » Fri, May 22, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

daneel_w wrote: post #141

I can't help noticing that the majority - not all, but the majority - of "No." responses here summarize identically: someone used MongoDB a long time ago (between 5 and 11 years) and ran into a problem, so they stopped using it and will never try or re-evaluate it again. I'm a bit surprised that developers and systems engineers get burned to the point that they disconnect from the daily reality of their occupation, t…

The problem with MongoDB is not that it was shaky in its infancy. It is that the developers made it very clear from the start that they don't care. Speed is everything, everything else is secondary. This changed a bit over time, but the latest Jepsen report (http://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-4.2.6) is still a mess and by now I'm pretty sure that is less "shaky in its infancy" and more a deep seated design problem that will never be fixed.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#164

Post by stetrain » Fri, May 22, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

I'd be curious if anyone has experience using Mongo or other document DBs as a read model projection database in a CQRS event sourced system.

That is, data which can be reconstructed from a consistent event store at any point, and is organized into structures for fast querying and loading for display on the client.

- Backend load -> update -> store updates must be atomic and consistent

- Client reads are fine being eventually consistent

- Need to store structured data (ie a calendar event with the names of all participants) but also find and update nested data (ie a participant's name changes).

- Client queries need indexed filter and sort capability on specific document fields.

Mongo or similar databases seem like they might be ideal for this use case, since they allow storage of nested document data while still being able to index and perform updates on that nested data, but I haven't really seen a deep dive from anyone using it for this purpose.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#165

Post by ecoqba11 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

Yes, but migrating to PostgreSQL.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#166

Post by quotha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #129

Seems like nobody wants to use MongoDB, but at the same time it’s a $12B public company whose stock price is surging. Is MongoDB the new mini-Oracle?

That's what I am wondering, why is the stock so high? We used MongoDB maybe 6-7 years ago, and quickly moved on. Does it cost a lot to use?

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#167

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

gavinray wrote: post #137

StavrosK wrote: post #49

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.

> "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." Ahh yes, just like the dialogue of the never-stale "Mongodb is Webscale" meme video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ > MySQL is slow as a dog. MongoDB will run circles around MySQL because MongoDB is web scale. > "MongoDB does h…

> > Does /dev/null support sharding?

I watch the video every time I see it just for this shit.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#168

Post by quotha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

adityapatadia wrote: post #8

We use it extensively. Basically the low overhead and almost no maintenance requirement of startup world is nicely satisfied by Mongo. In our last 3 years of usage, we never faced any issues from DB. It's improved a lot in last 2-3 years and I can say it's rock solid right now. I am basically finding no reason to switch to any other DB.

What is your business/website ?

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#169

Post by CyanLite2 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

We stopped using it because indexing was annoying, and we found a product (CosmosDB) that automatically indexes everything for us and still has a pretty decent SQL-like query syntax.

I also think the "cool" factor has stopped. It was very chic to use Mongo back in 2010 when everybody else was trying to scale with SQL. Nowadays, DynamoDB/CosmosDB/Cassandra eats Mongo for lunch.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#170

Post by jgalt212 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

carlps wrote: post #142

rubyfan wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/caveat i know nothing about how mongo is storing data and haven’t used it since 2010 it doesn’t really have to approach the schemas that way. one would think it would be optimized for repeat schema in the same way one might create the schema definition and then reference it in packing and unpacking the data. seems like if there was schema overhead taking up storage unnecessarily that could be optimized relatively ea…

There's something beautiful about normalizing the storage of denormalized schemas.

Yes, and the sooner you do it the better. But doing it during project planning / experimentation phase (or when you don't know what the final result should be yet) will really just slow you down. In many ways, very similar to the static / dynamic language trade offs.