Marketing & ease of use (for example, if you try to insert into a collection that does not exist, it's automatically created for you).
Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
101–110 of 164 posts
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#102Any criticism of MongoDB that does not acknowledge WiredTiger and the plethora of positive changes that made MongoDB much, much better in the 3.0, 3.2 and 3.4 releases is criticism that is not fully thought out. It's like complaining getting graphic cards working because of drivers is difficult on Ubuntu, based on experience with linux in 2005.
In the end it doesn't really matter. I feel the article is an educational one, but as it's the chance for us to take our sides of the fence in praising and criticising, we'll still do it anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if half of the commenters haven't used Mongo, or stopped in the 2.0-2.2 days. A lot of software fails, companies close, while some succeed. Some software that has been hyped up ended up not succeeding,…
> I wouldn't be surprised if half of the commenters haven't used Mongo, or stopped in the 2.0-2.2 days.
You would be correct, as the mountain of ignorance about MongoDB on display in this and all HN threads on MongoDB attest to.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#103The misplaced hype cycle is real. 10gen is not a company dedicated to databases, at least not if the initial code quality of MongoDB is a signal (and it should be, since if you know a thing or two about storage you wouldn't take the compromises it initially did) Unfortunately, many fresh graduates with no experience in storage decided to evaluate the technology based on its very visible merits, without considering th…
Have you ever worked on a significant project using MongoDB? I did. I wouldn't use it again. But reliability just wasn't an issue. There was a time when there were insane defaults that made this an issue, but that's a long time ago.
Any idea about Memsql? We are evaluating it at our company and all the info is kind of fuzzy.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess... SQL is a lot for newcomers to grasp on top of learning the rest of their stack. The appeal of "no schema" is most likely what gets them as it seems easier than SQL. Simple things at first seem daunting like: constraints, joins, and indexes. What they fail to see is that doing these database level things in the application layer becomes the final level hell and you get to live it. People also undervalue th…
Maybe I'm too old now... but SQL is relational algebra translated into some sort of code/language. I did a lot of SQL & relational algebra for my undergrad databases class [which was about 20 years ago now]. Has SQL/DBs been phased out of CS education? Just genuinely curious...
I graduated 7-8 years ago and we did a lot of SQL so I'd surprised if that's not the case today. I think one or two SQL/relational database classes are almost a norm.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#105I find it difficult to seriously address comments to this thread. People still referencing 10gen and talking about data points from 5-10 years ago (2009, 2012, 2013).
You do realize it's 2017 now, right? Many things have changed in MongoDB (and in the IT world in general) during the last 5 years. MongoDB is a mature, established, full-featured database - recognized by Gartner as a "challenger" to more established RDBMS vendors like Oracle and Microsoft.
MongoDB has many built in features that are extremely attractive for building modern applications. Built in HA & DR, horizontal scalability, multiple storage engines, rich indexing and query capabilities, enhanced BI features in aggregation framework, and many more...
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess... SQL is a lot for newcomers to grasp on top of learning the rest of their stack. The appeal of "no schema" is most likely what gets them as it seems easier than SQL. Simple things at first seem daunting like: constraints, joins, and indexes. What they fail to see is that doing these database level things in the application layer becomes the final level hell and you get to live it. People also undervalue th…
Maybe I'm too old now... but SQL is relational algebra translated into some sort of code/language. I did a lot of SQL & relational algebra for my undergrad databases class [which was about 20 years ago now]. Has SQL/DBs been phased out of CS education? Just genuinely curious...
A huge amount of people working as developers have no formal CS education whatsoever. In my company I even hear it touted as a perverse point of pride sometimes. (Kind of like, Oh you have a degree? I studied biology and I can still do the same job.)
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#107I've seen a few comments mention RethinkDB ... what are the advantages over MongoDB? I can read their feature page but as someone who isn't an expert, I'm not sure what's marketing hype and what's genuine advantage.
The company got bankrupted and they set up an org to fund its development. (Sagemath moved to Postgresql from RethinkDB after the company got sold. The guy behind sage said it was better in his blog about the switch)
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#108Back in 2012 I worked at a startup and we had a few backend data stores (Vertica, Postgres, Redis, Big Table, MySQL, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Hadoop). When 10gen came along, they sold us an amazing vision. We were processing 500 million to billion social media messages a day and they sold us on this dream that we would have very fast writes, a cluster of 9 machines in master-slave-slave config for fail over. We woul…
"which was actually funny to watch one of our engineers try to unlearn table --denormalization-- normalization*" Going from sql to nosql would be denormalizing data not normalizing it so, the engineer would be unlearning table normalization.
Ah yes, you're correct!
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#109Back in 2012 I worked at a startup and we had a few backend data stores (Vertica, Postgres, Redis, Big Table, MySQL, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Hadoop). When 10gen came along, they sold us an amazing vision. We were processing 500 million to billion social media messages a day and they sold us on this dream that we would have very fast writes, a cluster of 9 machines in master-slave-slave config for fail over. We woul…
You do realize it's 2017 now, right? Many things have changed in MongoDB (and in the IT world in general) during the last 5 years. MongoDB is a mature, established, full-featured database - recognized by Gartner as a "challenger" to more established RDBMS vendors like Oracle and Microsoft. http://bit.ly/2uP3Obi
I'm sure it's better today. I'm talking about my experience back then. It may be a challenger, but it still has tradeoffs that system architects need to factor in when making database decisions.
Re: Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right; Facebook, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap - all serious tech stacks that started and (in the case of the last two) continue to use PHP. Reminds me of: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329
Facebook does not "normal" PHP that much, they use host of languages, including Hack, erlang and lots of Python.
Most of their code is Hack, and Hack is a superset of PHP (last time I checked all it really adds is static typing and async)