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The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

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Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#181

Post by forgotmyinfo »

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,…

Nonsense. Choosing the correct database isn't "premature optimization", it's the bare minimum of being a competent programmer. Why do we never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over?

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#182

Post by wlll »

tkellogg wrote: post #141
finaard wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the article read more that PostgreSQL might have been the better choice from the beginning - but due to lack of experience in the team MongoDB was "good enough" at that point.

I recall when my team chose MongoDB ~2011, Postgres & friends didn't have JSON columns, so there was a lot of extra data modelling that probably was unnecessary. The biggest use case for MongoDB was for huMongous data. Obvs MongoDB was a good fit, because of the name.

https://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/#json

You're right, 9.4/9.5 were when JSONB was introduced and expanded (release 2013/2014).

That said, it's a big decision to go with two very very different technologies (relational vs Document store) just for a column type, storing JSON must have been a pretty major product feature?

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#183

Post by benterix »

finikytou wrote: post #137
benterix wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't missed much TBH. I think the only case where you'd use it in new projects in DynamoDB if you work with AWS.

Dynamo is not mongo?

No, DocumentDB is Mongo. What I understand the OP parent referred to is the NoSQL hype era, not just Mongo which was probably the most popular one at that time.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#184

Post by forgotmyinfo »

renegade-otter wrote: post #36
sph wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres is no hype, it was already in plateau of productivity when MongoDB came to the web scale scene. Hadoop just like Mongo had their hyped time in the sun, but RDBMS are far too advanced and versatile than any of them were.

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…

This is what happens when you hire 20-somethings who don't know how computers actually work to build your entire business. You either learn about relational databases in school, or through experience. Relational algebra has been around for half a century, at least. If someone doesn't know about its utility, it's a failure of the education system, or a failure of corporate incentives.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#185

Post by forgotmyinfo »

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…

That's as ridiculous as saying "integer division will be useless in 20 years". Sometimes relational databases really are the optimal solution to certain problems. I really wish CS had better authority figures, although we shouldn't need them in the first place.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#186

Post by wlll »

forgotmyinfo wrote: post #180
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.

I was also a bit confused by that part. What is it about Postgres that prevents rapid prototyping? It's not like the schema is set in stone, or even particularly hard to change once you've created it.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#187

Post by forgotmyinfo »

GiorgioG wrote: post #116
arp242 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unpopular opinion, Robert C Martin has caused more harm than good. People take his ideas and blindly follow them no matter the cost. I’m looking at you clean architecture.

Well yeah, solving problems and thinking critically and learning are hard and boring. "Uncle Bob" gives you handy alhorisms you can spam on your next pull request and then feel like you've done something.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#188

Post by forgotmyinfo »

arp242 wrote: post #177
pydry wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That happened to esr, too, although he derailed right after 9/11, and it's been downhill ever since.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#189

Post by arcbyte »

GiorgioG wrote: post #116
arp242 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unpopular opinion, Robert C Martin has caused more harm than good. People take his ideas and blindly follow them no matter the cost. I’m looking at you clean architecture.

There's definitely a missing piece he hasn't explained well enough. I've seen the best code in the world because it was clean architecture and I've also seen some truly atrocious code in the style of "clean architecture".

To me the difference was in recognizing that the architecture advice is implicit - its not actually written down in the code, rather the code exemplifies it - and the business domain is explicitly modeled. When developers name everything "use case" and "interactor" and go crazy with packages and folder structures with architectural names it's a recipe for terribleness.

Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

#190

Post by wlll »

darby_eight wrote: post #171
thiht wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (a…

The price of persistent storage and memory was the same for Mongo as it was for Postgres back when the NoSQL movement happened. Mongo wasn't made of magic scaling fairies and still needed resources. As soon as you cranked up the safety of Mongo to a nearly acceptable level it's performance fell through the floor. The only reason people though it performed amazingly was because of Mongo's rather deceptive marketing.

I use the term "nearly acceptable" because for a long time Mongo's data consistency was absolutely crap (https://jepsen.io/analyses)

Personally I think people used Mongo because it was new, shiny and exciting and it promised performance (though it didn't really deliver for most people).

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