Why everyone hates MongoDB
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Why everyone hates MongoDB
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#2Because it's not a particularly good database, but it's being marketed strongly.
There are better (more mature, easier to maintain, faster, etc.) alternatives for both single-machine (Postgres, MySQL) and distributed (Cassandra, HBase) usage.
It's a pain to take care of, it does table scans all the time (partly because it has no schema, partly because of design issues), it has pretty poor profiling tools. It's almost impossible to use without a model/schema in the app. Migrations are a pain.
The one thing it's particularly well suited at is indexing and searching JSON-like data.
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#3It's cool to hate MongoDB, it used to be really cool to like MongoDB. Same thing happend with MySQL probably 10 years ago. I have built some apps with Mongo and it's fine as long as you don't expect it to be a SQL database. A lot of times I wish it had features x,y,z from sql land, and other times I wish MySQL was schemaless.
Nowadays, I have begun to defer my database choice until I absolutely have to put an app into production if possible. That way I can write an app and have it working without worrying too much about queries, caching, and so on until I need to actually put it out on a real server.
MySQL, Mongo, HBase, Cassandra, Postgres, Riak, Redis, Memcache, Couchbase, Filesystem? It doesn't matter.
They're all going to break at different times for different reasons depending on how you use them and what scale you are at. Everything breaks at scale eventually.
Build something awesome enough that it breaks under the user load. That's a good problem to have.
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#4"Everyone" may be a bit of hyperbole. I have some particular use cases where it works really well, and others where I wouldn't dream of deploying it. Using any technology "because it's cool" without understanding the implications only works for experimental stuff where that's the whole point.
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#5Because it's not a particularly good database, but it's being marketed strongly. There are better (more mature, easier to maintain, faster, etc.) alternatives for both single-machine (Postgres, MySQL) and distributed (Cassandra, HBase) usage. It's a pain to take care of, it does table scans all the time (partly because it has no schema, partly because of design issues), it has pretty poor profiling tools. It's almost…
for both single-machine (Postgres, MySQL) and distributed (Cassandra, HBase) usage.
I'm surprised that MySQL Cluster Edition doesn't get more attention in the scale-out space. It is a simply brilliant product.
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#6Because it's not a particularly good database, but it's being marketed strongly. There are better (more mature, easier to maintain, faster, etc.) alternatives for both single-machine (Postgres, MySQL) and distributed (Cassandra, HBase) usage. It's a pain to take care of, it does table scans all the time (partly because it has no schema, partly because of design issues), it has pretty poor profiling tools. It's almost…
'The one thing it's particularly well suited at is indexing and searching JSON-like data.'
OMG! What a surprise!
The fact that I read the documentation and through testing discovered its a perfect fit for our application means I am not one of the 'everybody' that hates it.
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#7Because it's not a particularly good database, but it's being marketed strongly. There are better (more mature, easier to maintain, faster, etc.) alternatives for both single-machine (Postgres, MySQL) and distributed (Cassandra, HBase) usage. It's a pain to take care of, it does table scans all the time (partly because it has no schema, partly because of design issues), it has pretty poor profiling tools. It's almost…
It's easy to jump in, and able to provide decent environment for developers. I believe that's similar to early MySQL, you know with only MyISAM tables, where there was no transaction support or referential integrity and your data was open to all kinds of corruption issues. It was easy to use, was installed almost everywhere and there were great tools around it. It has grown to be a pretty decent RDBMS. Mongo has the same traction behind it, so it should become a great solution in no time. (Given a decent development process it is. See PHP for a counter example)
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#8There's no content in that article other than a link to a google search for "why mongodb is bad".
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#9It's cool to hate MongoDB, it used to be really cool to like MongoDB. Same thing happend with MySQL probably 10 years ago. I have built some apps with Mongo and it's fine as long as you don't expect it to be a SQL database. A lot of times I wish it had features x,y,z from sql land, and other times I wish MySQL was schemaless. Nowadays, I have begun to defer my database choice until I absolutely have to put an app int…
It's cool to hate MongoDB
When a product is pushed as essentially a silver-bullet -- often by people who have never and will never actually build anything with it -- it is naturally going to get a lot of backlash by people who see through the problems, and moreso by those who buy the hype and then smash into the reality halfway through their projects.
I speak from personal experience on the first point, while the second has come from countless real-world case studies. A couple of years back I had several widely distributed pieces declared "trolls" because I essentially called for a sobering reset on the NoSQL hype train. Every single thing I said has been well proven out since, so there's that.
Re: Why everyone hates MongoDB
#10Because it's not a particularly good database, but it's being marketed strongly. There are better (more mature, easier to maintain, faster, etc.) alternatives for both single-machine (Postgres, MySQL) and distributed (Cassandra, HBase) usage. It's a pain to take care of, it does table scans all the time (partly because it has no schema, partly because of design issues), it has pretty poor profiling tools. It's almost…
It's easy to jump in, and able to provide decent environment for developers. I believe that's similar to early MySQL, you know with only MyISAM tables, where there was no transaction support or referential integrity and your data was open to all kinds of corruption issues. It was easy to use, was installed almost everywhere and there were great tools around it. It has grown to be a pretty decent RDBMS. Mongo has the…
But why wait, when you can use Postgres now?