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I have deployed Postgres and MongoDB at petabyte scale. I am happy to answer questions from others who are intellectually curious about differences between the two that would matter to users who have to spend serious amounts of money on their databases.
I have deployed Postgres and MongoDB at petabyte scale. I am happy to answer questions from others who are intellectually curious about differences between the two that would matter to users who have to spend serious amounts of money on their databases.
vanilla, single-node postgres ?
It basically never makes sense to drive an application with MongoDB, which is why a lot of folks think it's strictly worse.
A perfect MongoDB (or any document db, really) use case has zero relationships. This is accomplished by duplicating data across documents where you would normally use a foreign key in an RDS. Naturally, this is anti-pattern for RDS-minded folks and everything you'd want to do with Mongo stems from this mode of thought (preprocessing/data replication instead of lookups).
Personally, I've had great success with Mongo and appreciate it for it's incredible depth in text searching via Atlas Search. Surprisingly, the web interface for Atlas in general is actually quite good and it's the only one I can bear to use; I usually can't stand them.
I had such a bad experience with Mongo DB back in 2012-2013 that I don't think I'll ever use it again, or even really consider it. But maybe it's changed and gotten better since then? Anyway. I just use Postgres.
If you like the document db idea there are a lot of choices, especially https://arangodb.com/ which I think gets little attention because people who use it see it as a secret weapon. Too bad about the license though. Also https://couchdb.apache.org/ and https://developer.marklogic.com/
Comparison - https://arangodb.com/subscriptions/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect a good amount of the hype around NoSQL was driven by frontend developers transitioning into backend work via Node, and Mongo being relatively simple to get started on compared to relational databases. And that culture seems to have stuck. To this day, many popular backend js frameworks either completely ignore relational data storage or slap some bare bones interface over it.
I believe that this is also why we're starting to see a surge in people wanting to run SQLite as their backend database. It's similarly simple to start out with, and also similarly flimsy when dealing with actual data integrity. Very limited types, limited isolation options, ref integrity disabled by default (Mongo DB also disables things by default that hurts their benchmarks). But hey, SQLite is better than Mongo D…