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Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#141

Post by daneel_w »

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, that software is often shaky in its infancy but almost always improves over time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#142

Post by carlps »

rubyfan wrote: post #115
thomascgalvin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is (probably) an artifact of Mongo's schema-less nature; when you don't have tables with structure, every document you store has to detail its own schema inline. In a relational database, you have columns with names and types, and that info is shared by all of the rows. In Mongo, every cell has to specify its name and type, even if that layout is shared by every other cell in the document. Mongo's way is more fl…

/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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#143

Post by workingname »

We've used it for several years after switching away from it for Docdb last year and then back again in November. We've had applications running on both MongoDB and AWS continuously through 2019, but our clients and team in general needed certain things: Ddb doesn't support everything we've done w/ mongo in the past. Our team also feel it's easier to integrate and translate to clients.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#144

Post by scarface74 »

doublesCs wrote: post #122
scarface74 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m saying it’s completely illogical to base technical decisions on information that is 10 years old when just like you can see the modern specs of the iPhone and compare to the first iPod, you can also see the modern specs of Mongo, read third party assessments, and even look at the source code to see if it meets your needs.

You have a view of software development so narrow minded to a point it's cartoonish.

You’re right. I’ve only been doing this professionally for 25 years and as a hobbyist for 10 years before that.

I’ve only developed software from everything from 8 bit computers with 128K of RAM, to DEC mainframes to Android tablets....

What do I know?

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#147

Post by marcus_holmes »

josephg wrote: post #27

No. Every time I've used mongodb we've ended up regretting it for one reason or another. And migrating to a different database after launch is a huge hassle. I've done a couple projects where we kicked off with postgres using JSONB columns for early iteration. Then we gradually migrated to normal SQL columns as the product matured and our design decisions crystallized. That gave us basically all the benefits of mongo…

I've recently adopted this practice. All new features use a JSONB (or hstore - I'm experimenting with both) field instead of a "real" one until they're bedded in and stop changing. Then I convert the field + data to a real field with a NOT NULL constraint in one easy migration.

So far so good. Being able to join on JSONB fields right in the SQL is awesome

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#148

Post by nemothekid »

gjmacd wrote: post #79

Someone needs to explain to me what the benefits of NoSQL with MongoDB are when you have the JSONB column type and the ability to query and insert at the field level with JSON in PostgreSQL? Maybe there's some benefit, but I'm not seeing that major "gotta have it" feature or performance gains. And I ask this question seriously, because I just don't know the answer.

>Someone needs to explain to me what the benefits of NoSQL with MongoDB are when you have the JSONB column type

Schema-less design is a feature of MongoDB, not NoSQL, but has unfortunately has persisted as one of the "benefits" of NoSQL. However when you look at the top 5 "NoSQL" databases on db-engine rankings only 2 support "JSON", MongoDB and Elasticsearch. The rest are key value, or require schemas (Cassandra).

The appeal of NoSQL, to me, has been the scale out to tens, hundreds or thousands of machines relatively easily. This is where Postgres does not shine, and this is the only reason I'd choose something as binding as DynanmoDB over something like Postgres.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#149

Post by throwawaygh »

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 first place?”

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

#150

Post by ken »

randtrain34 wrote: post #73

All of these replies are for Mongo's product 5+ years ago. MongoDB has changed A LOT since then. Has anyone used MongoDB IN THE PAST 2 YEARS ?

I think the saying goes: fool me once, shame on you; fool me for like 7 or 8 years in a row, shame on me.

At this point, if MongoDB could turn on a dime from being an unreliable system to a robust one, that would be the most remarkable part of this story, because I've never seen that happen with any engineering organization. It's rare that engineering departments can significantly improve their quality culture, and it's never fast. Microsoft Windows went from crashing (for me) >=3 times a day to crashing almost never, and it took them over 10 years -- and replacing their kernel twice. I've seen nothing from MongoDB to make me believe they even realize the problem, much less are on their way to solving it.

In the lifetime of a database, 2 years is nothing. And it's always easier for quality to slip than to improve. If they turned it all around since I last touched MongoDB, good for them, but they've burned through all their trust, and it's going to take a lot longer than that to earn it back.

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