21–30 of 74 posts
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I never got a definite answer: What problem does MongoDB even try to solve?
The problem of schemas slowing your development.
But the majority of databases are only accessed by one web app. And in that web app you can enforce that schema in code. In fact in code you have much safer and powerful options e.g. enforcing business rules such as this string field must start with aaa.
The "Mongo DB is Web Scale" video just turned 10 years old. I'm pretty sure that was a big factor in MongoDB not being taken seriously by many people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
The "Mongo DB is Web Scale" video just turned 10 years old. I'm pretty sure that was a big factor in MongoDB not being taken seriously by many people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Lots of interesting info, and I really like working with MongoDB. But I am baffled by the claim that "MongoDB is the king." In all the circles I work in, I only hear Mongo dismissed as a joke. Unfortunately the company's dismissiveness of RDBMSes, their hubris in pushing NoSQL, and their blunders over what are extremely poor default settings all combine to make MongoDB something I don't see anyone taking seriously. I…
I am biased but you are definitely missing out by just listening to your friends on this one. These days MongoDB is pretty mature and the “MongoDB sucks” meme is getting pretty long in the tooth. It turns out it takes a decade to build a new database that’s half decent and has all the features people want. It’s really hard! Ask anyone that’s tried. The path is littered with skeletons. Of course, there are those datab…
And that's just a publicly available example. I have a client who paid for a MongoDB Inc. to send an "expert" down to assess the viability of a project, who flat out said the project can't be done and left it there; a week later the official MongoDB Inc. report says "We can definitely get it done. Why don't you move to our managed MongoDB Atlas service? That'll be $10K." For the record, my professional assessment was also that it'd be impossible to do it on a data model like Mongo's.
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> Of course, there are those databases that are “perfect” from the start and never made any mistakes but is anyone talking about them today? Even Postgres gets it wrong sometimes.
1. The snark isn't helping your cause.
2. Then there are databases that claim to be "perfect" from the start, having always put up a facade without every admitting any of their own flaws. Like MongoDB.
The thing MongoDB does best — though not something a DBMS can be judged by — is marketing. Not just the marketing they push themselves — "MongoDB is web scale!", "90% of RDBMS use can be replaced by MongoDB!" — but also the marketing it can get its fans to push.
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I interviewed recently at a payment provider that is rewriting its PHP/Mysql monolith in Java & go microservices with MongoDb. The architect would praise static typing but would prefer MongoDb "because it's easier to add a column". It felt weird but I've never used MongoDb so I could not really argue about it.
Sounds like a bad architect or someone who only knows surface features and doesn't have experience with the actual databases. Adding a column is not hard in any relational database, and pretty much all modern ones support no-downtime transactional schema updates with backfills, concurrent index builds, etc. Also the schema always exists somewhere, and it's usually to put it in the database so it's next to (and valida…
It's next to useless for ensuring data integrity and why every app you see will have data validation inside the code itself. Whether it's checking that an email has a valid structure or that a payment is not negative.
Majority of the logic will be the code so it makes no sense to me other than if you have multiple clients accessing that database why it must be enforced at the database level as well.
MongoDB still has an awful reputation on Hacker News but I really appreciate the take from "Why RethinkDB Failed" [0]: > People wanted RethinkDB to be fast on workloads they actually tried, rather than “real world” workloads we suggested. For example, they’d write quick scripts to measure how long it takes to insert ten thousand documents without ever reading them back. MongoDB mastered these workloads brilliantly, w…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Bostic
The "Mongo DB is Web Scale" video just turned 10 years old. I'm pretty sure that was a big factor in MongoDB not being taken seriously by many people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem of schemas slowing your development.
There is this myth that schemas must be enforced at the database level. But the majority of databases are only accessed by one web app. And in that web app you can enforce that schema in code. In fact in code you have much safer and powerful options e.g. enforcing business rules such as this string field must start with aaa.
You must have single point to enforce anything. This is very rarely the case with the app, where a) there will be 20 places that access database and b) often some tasks are done by operating on a database directly
Some rules cannot be enforced by database, sure, but "a field must exists and be a string" is infinitely better than noting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am biased but you are definitely missing out by just listening to your friends on this one. These days MongoDB is pretty mature and the “MongoDB sucks” meme is getting pretty long in the tooth. It turns out it takes a decade to build a new database that’s half decent and has all the features people want. It’s really hard! Ask anyone that’s tried. The path is littered with skeletons. Of course, there are those datab…
MongoDB Inc. is still in the business of lying to its users through its teeth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23499658 And that's just a publicly available example. I have a client who paid for a MongoDB Inc. to send an "expert" down to assess the viability of a project, who flat out said the project can't be done and left it there; a week later the official MongoDB Inc. report says "We can definitely get it do…
Also Mongo wins by a large margin on "how little you need to know to get started" with any relational db.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is this myth that schemas must be enforced at the database level. But the majority of databases are only accessed by one web app. And in that web app you can enforce that schema in code. In fact in code you have much safer and powerful options e.g. enforcing business rules such as this string field must start with aaa.
>There is this myth that schemas must be enforced at the database level. You must have single point to enforce anything. This is very rarely the case with the app, where a) there will be 20 places that access database and b) often some tasks are done by operating on a database directly Some rules cannot be enforced by database, sure, but "a field must exists and be a string" is infinitely better than noting.
In most cases it is only a single web app connecting to a database and in micro-services architectures you can enforce it through a shared database access library.
And any company that allows users to make direct changes to a database without going through some security layer is pretty incompetent. Quite sure you wouldn't be able to get PCI/HIPAA certified with that sort of behaviour either.