Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy • Hacker News Board

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#71

Post by stesch » Fri, Dec 28, 2012, 12:23 AM UTC

mminer wrote: post #63

stesch wrote: post #60

Wondering why everybody is using MySQL if Postgresql is supposed to be better. Are there any (startup) success stories involving Postgresql?

Perhaps one reason is that more hosting providers support MySQL but not PostgreSQL. Amazon AWS, Google Cloud SQL, and numerous others offer hosted MySQL solutions but not PostgreSQL. I'm unsure how much overall usage such service providers account for though; it would be an interesting stat.

Here and on Reddit I can read stories about people who are free to choose whatever they want. Nearly nobody uses Java or PHP if you can decide themselves.

But it's always MySQL. Starting with MySQL, going back to MySQL, staying with MySQL.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#72

Post by nasalgoat » Fri, Dec 28, 2012, 7:37 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #2

Genuine question- who is using MongoDB successfully in production, and at scale? I'm not aware of anyone myself- I hear of it being used in hackathons etc because its so quick to set up, but I'd be curious to know what people are using it with.

We have a very large MongoDB installation running in production and at scale, and it works pretty well.

That said, 99% of our production issues involve bugs in MongoDB and it's inability to effectively use all available resources before it becomes unresponsive. I would say it needs a few more generations to become truly solid.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#73

Post by nickaknudson » Tue, Jan 01, 2013, 9:59 PM UTC

I think the real issue here is that most people don't understand /how/ to use MongoDB.

The best use case for MongoDB is as a document store. I can essentially cache numerous MySQL requests into a compiled set of useful information. Especially if the information changes somewhat infrequently, then instead of running MySQL requests for every page load I can pull the information from MongoDB. In most cases when I use MongoDB, its not as a persistent data store, but as a "compiled" data store.

MongoDB also has some useful set operations.

I for one don't believe that MongoDB is /directly/ competing with MySQL, Postgres, etc. but rather enhances these databases.