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After experiencing how easy it is to get started on and develop against MongoDB, I feel like RDBMS are a premature optimization. Its so much easier to evolve yo

After experiencing how easy it is to get started on and develop against MongoDB, I feel like RDBMS are a premature optimization. Its so much easier to evolve your data model, and write arbitrary queries, and its plenty fast enough for 90% of the web apps out there. Save the RDBMS for when you have relational data that needs to be faster, or whatever other feature you happen to need for that part of your app.

jpcx01 17y ago
Great point. The thing I'm interested in on these new data storage technologies is at the low level, rapid development, early stage (low traffic) portion of a project since thats where I'm at. I'd rather be able to remove barriers like having to design a schema, and get some early efficiencies to develop my app fast and iterate. Though, my experience in scaling every site that needed to be scaled has concluded with sharding. So MongoDB sort of fits there as well with its autosharding capabilities.
- Vitaly 17y ago
  nosql databases do not free you from having to design your schema! they do free you from having to run migrations, but those are trivial while you are small, migrations are only a problem when you have huge tables. With nosql dbs you can skip migrations and do 'repair on read' schema changes, but you still need to design your schema. and coming from sql world, designing nosql schemas can be a lot of pain since you have to change your perspective completely. and crazy naming (of cassandra and other big-table derivatives) doesn't help either: wtf is column family, etc :).
DennisP 17y ago
Exactly. If Cassandra fits my needs, I've got a fast, trivially-scalable database that basically needs no administration, for free. Why would I spend money on a commercial sql database? That said, Cassandra won't always fit my needs. Sometimes I really do need sophisticated queries and arbitrary transactions. I've been enjoying this guy's articles, because he's bringing up a lot of good performance tips for those times when a relational database is the right tool for the job.

jpcx01 17y ago

Great point. The thing I'm interested in on these new data storage technologies is at the low level, rapid development, early stage (low traffic) portion of a project since thats where I'm at. I'd rather be able to remove barriers like having to design a schema, and get some early efficiencies to develop my app fast and iterate. Though, my experience in scaling every site that needed to be scaled has concluded with sharding. So MongoDB sort of fits there as well with its autosharding capabilities.

Vitaly 17y ago
nosql databases do not free you from having to design your schema! they do free you from having to run migrations, but those are trivial while you are small, migrations are only a problem when you have huge tables. With nosql dbs you can skip migrations and do 'repair on read' schema changes, but you still need to design your schema. and coming from sql world, designing nosql schemas can be a lot of pain since you have to change your perspective completely. and crazy naming (of cassandra and other big-table derivatives) doesn't help either: wtf is column family, etc :).

DennisP 17y ago

Exactly. If Cassandra fits my needs, I've got a fast, trivially-scalable database that basically needs no administration, for free. Why would I spend money on a commercial sql database? That said, Cassandra won't always fit my needs. Sometimes I really do need sophisticated queries and arbitrary transactions. I've been enjoying this guy's articles, because he's bringing up a lot of good performance tips for those times when a relational database is the right tool for the job.