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The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

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Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#171

Post by darby_eight »

thiht wrote: post #56
renegade-otter wrote: post #20

The 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.

> There's very few legitimate use cases for not using a RDBMS as a main data store

I don't think that's true—all the old cases that were legitimate before are still legitimate. The price of both persistent storage and memory has simply come way down to the point where many computational workloads are viable under vertically scalable databases again. I suspect the pendulum will swing the other way one day yet again (and of course there is a rich ecosystem of ways to query horizontally, if not transactionally, with SQL that will likely temper this swing even further).

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#172

Post by Shorel »

arp242 wrote: post #50
renegade-otter wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

His words: "I am also self-taught. I never got a degree of any kind. I entered the industry at the tender age of 17 and never looked back. Frankly, school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — especially in the software field."

https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/107212575854868889...

Which means his opinions are more often than not uninformed opinions and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#173

Post by Shorel »

benterix wrote: post #127
renegade-otter wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

> For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all been?" To be frank, PostgreSQL has evolved a lot since the late nineties. There was a time where people preferred MySQL over it at it seemed to work faster, certain things were easier and so on.

There was a time PostgreSQL did not run under Windows, and that is IMO what gave MySQL the market share edge.

Without these windowless years, PostgreSQL would be the most used RDBMS right now.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#174

Post by 999900000999 »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #38

Ah, 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…

>As part of that stack, we chose MongoDB + Mongoose ORM because the combination presented least overhead and allowed us to ship quality features quickly. As Sir Tony Hoare states, “premature optimization is the root of all evil,” and there was certainly no need for further optimization at the time.

Looks like the tool did a great job while they were getting started. Mongo is very easy to hack something together with, later on it looks like they just needed to migrate to something more stable

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#175

Post by cwbriscoe »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #14
p-e-w wrote: post #2

At some point during the past 10 years or so, the world realized that document databases are actually a bad idea, and relational databases can do the same job better with just a few easy-to-implement QoL improvements (such as JSON operators in SQL). Meanwhile MongoDB's creators thought this was a great time to make Mongo non-free software, presumably with the goal of making a quick buck from cloud operators. The resu…

I‘m not sure that is the case. What I‘m seeing is that people use the cloud-native document stores such as DynamoDB instead of Mongo. The only thing zoomers hate more than traditional SQL databases is XML.

Doesn't everybody hate XML?

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#176

Post by swasheck »

999900000999 wrote: post #174
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #38

Ah, 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…

>As part of that stack, we chose MongoDB + Mongoose ORM because the combination presented least overhead and allowed us to ship quality features quickly. As Sir Tony Hoare states, “premature optimization is the root of all evil,” and there was certainly no need for further optimization at the time. Looks like the tool did a great job while they were getting started. Mongo is very easy to hack something together with,…

yeah ... in the early days of mongo it was pitched as a replacement for relational because a) it had faster writes without those pesky joins and constraints, and b) because it's too hard to model data, so chances are it's just unstructured. the onslaught of "relational is dead" and "joins are annoying" was tremendous

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#177

Post by arp242 »

pydry wrote: post #80
rjbwork wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's always been fundamentally a salesman. Hopping on the hype trains lets him sell more.

He's always been fundamentally a zealot who sees most narratives in black and white terms. It's an extremely unfortunate characteristic of a software engineer. It's the same reason he's so pro Trump I think.

I didn't even know about that; I checked his Twitter, and first thing is a reply to the Baltimore bridge collapse:

> Doors and wheels fall off airplanes. Hundreds of illegal immigrants assault and overrun border guards in Texas. We can’t even muster support for our allies in the security council. But at least our pronouns are in order.

https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/177262869295654553...

You really need to be a special sort of individual to go from a collapsed bridge to ranting about pronouns with no prompting or any prior mention of that. What a complete spanner.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#178

Post by swasheck »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #55
thih9 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

mongo was absolutely one of the most egregious (daresay dishonest?) purveyors of such myth. it was quite off-putting for me and my team.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#179

Post by Cyberdog »

What is the point of using a query builder if you’re only going to support a single RDBMS? Why not write straight SQL and avoid the unnecessary abstraction layer? Is the query builder really going to be easier to learn to use (particularly for non-trivial queries) than SQL?

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#180

Post by forgotmyinfo »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #38

Ah, 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…

Sorry, 100 times out of 100, "rapid prototyping" means "we built this with the wrong database, now we're stuck with it". If it isn't obvious how to store your data up front, then you either aren't planning your software well, or you don't actually know what you're building.
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