I started my career doing web development using PHP and mySQL. Then pivoted to something completely different for about 6-7 years as I got sick of spending all my time making stuff work in IE6. I heard it the whole nosql thing, didn't understand it but thought it sounded silly. Then came back to web dev 5 years ago and found postgres was all the hype and nobody talked about nosql any more. Glad I skipped it!
The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
51–60 of 339 posts
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Postgres is no hype, it was already in plateau of productivity when MongoDB came to the web scale scene. Hadoop just like Mongo had their hyped time in the sun, but RDBMS are far too advanced and versatile than any of them were.
I am not calling Postgres hype - it should have never been NOT hype. It's a reasonable default for most problems, Now all I read about is how Postgres is awesome, as if it's this great new thing. I guess that makes sense, as the new generation of engineers is rediscovering stable, reliable, lean technologies after a decade of excesses with "exotic" tech. For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all b…
Excited, vocal users make the most noise.
Somehow the entire Mongo DB era passed me through and I never used it once. I used to use MySQL in the 2000s, and switched to PostgreSQL in the 2010s.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#53The irony of it all is that MongoDB actually matured and you do not have to jump through hoops to have, say, transactions. I am ALL for Postgres, I even wrote a post about the importance of being fluent in relational databases: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-ar... What grinds my gears is the whiplash caused by this frantic stampede from one hype to the next. I am just waiting for the AI hyp…
Generally with these migrations biggest problem in my experience is that all the operational learnings are not transferrable.
You often want to create expertise and achieve operational excellence with the tech that you start out.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not calling Postgres hype - it should have never been NOT hype. It's a reasonable default for most problems, Now all I read about is how Postgres is awesome, as if it's this great new thing. I guess that makes sense, as the new generation of engineers is rediscovering stable, reliable, lean technologies after a decade of excesses with "exotic" tech. For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all b…
...and, continuing the cycle next season, devs will (re)discover NoSQL and document DBMS. I do wonder if this phenomenon of trendy tech is somehow integral to advancing the state of the industry, the SWE equivalent of early adopters. "Rediscovering the old" is a side effect, as old tech is used and reinterpreted in new ways. Kind of neat, really.
There’s an entire industry of people selling knowledge of the “next great thing/the one true way," but they need a new thing every few years as people learned whatever the old thing was.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#55Ah, the old "I used a wrong product for my problem and now I complain the product is bad because it does not suit my case." defence. MongoDB is a document database. It is not supposed to be good at relations. Also lacking support with cloud providers and lacking experience with MongoDB is not MongoDB's problem, it is your poor decisionmaking. If you value those things, you should have taken it into account when you w…
To be fair, Mongodb’s pr team did their best to present it as the solution to all problems. > In 2012, 10gen’s VP of Corporate Strategy Matt Asay argued “there will remain a relatively small sphere of applications unsuitable for MongoDB … the majority of application software that developers write will be in use cases that are better fits for MongoDB and other NoSQL technology … Those functions that really help a comp…
To be fair, almost all product PR teams do the same. I just ignore most of what they say in favour of my own opinion that I try to build based on reading actual technical documentation, experimenting with the product, etc.
Anybody who makes tech decisions based solely on what PR teams say is naive and incompetent at best.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#56The irony of it all is that MongoDB actually matured and you do not have to jump through hoops to have, say, transactions. I am ALL for Postgres, I even wrote a post about the importance of being fluent in relational databases: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-ar... What grinds my gears is the whiplash caused by this frantic stampede from one hype to the next. I am just waiting for the AI hyp…
Postgres is not hype though. There's very few legitimate use cases for not using a RDBMS as a main data store, and Postgres happens to be the most popular nowadays, for good reasons.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you choose EBITDA? Last I heard it was utter nonsense”, at least according to Warren Buffet. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tvnKylAyLbQ
People who use EBITDA are either trying to con you or they're conning themselves.
Probably not used in a conning context when it’s 200-300 million in the red.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#58The irony of it all is that MongoDB actually matured and you do not have to jump through hoops to have, say, transactions. I am ALL for Postgres, I even wrote a post about the importance of being fluent in relational databases: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-ar... What grinds my gears is the whiplash caused by this frantic stampede from one hype to the next. I am just waiting for the AI hyp…
Generally with these migrations biggest problem in my experience is that all the operational learnings are not transferrable. You often want to create expertise and achieve operational excellence with the tech that you start out.
Back in the day we used to say "you choose your database once". You can swap in/out a lot of things, but your data store is really the core.
It is shockingly hard to change your storage engine once you are serving customers, so you really want to get that right.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not calling Postgres hype - it should have never been NOT hype. It's a reasonable default for most problems, Now all I read about is how Postgres is awesome, as if it's this great new thing. I guess that makes sense, as the new generation of engineers is rediscovering stable, reliable, lean technologies after a decade of excesses with "exotic" tech. For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all b…
I remember Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob") going on about how No-SQL will replace literally all SQL and that there is literally not a single use case for relational data and SQL. I wonder if he ever came back on that. Now, my opinion of Martin in general is not especially high and he's a bit of a controversial figure, but it wasn't just the kids. And Martin is also all about reliable software, so that makes it even mo…
He's always been fundamentally a salesman. Hopping on the hype trains lets him sell more.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#60The one unsolicited piece of tech advice I always give is “Just use Postgres”.
Postgres Is Enough: https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f...
There’s some Mongo/json alternatives in the list if you really need unstructured data.
And there’s a huge plug-in ecosystem as well for just about anything you could imagine.