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I've been using and relying on MongoDB for years (since 2010). It's pleasant to develop for, the query interface is awesome, and the library / ORM support is to

I've been using and relying on MongoDB for years (since 2010). It's pleasant to develop for, the query interface is awesome, and the library / ORM support is top notch (Mongoid on ruby, and Mongoose on node). I also use Postgres regularly so I can compare the 2. And in my experience, I always enjoy working with Mongo more. Many people don't care about the developer experience and rather focus on Mongo's lack of features like joins and transactions. There's definitely tradeoffs to choosing Mongo and I wouldn't criticize anyone for picking Postgres over Mongo, however the amount of belly-aching about how Mongo is "the worst" was always pretty ridiculous.

mrgordon 9y ago
If you’ve been using it since 2010, then your usage predates the aggregation framework. I’ll just state for the record that writing a JavaScript mapreduce (or telling a data scientist to write one) to count records is not a good experience. The other issue that got me was I was running queries that should have used an index but indexOnly kept coming back false. I dig into the Mongo JIRA and sure enough it was a bug and queries were returning incorrect values for whether they were using an index. The reason most people got mad at Mongo was probably their benchmark gaming though. They made unsafe writes the default for a long time so their default configuration benchmark would blow away SQL databases which fsync to disk by default (very reasonably!)
franciscop 9y ago
I have been using Mongoose for long enough (since 2012?) to have felt its pain point. The documentation is lacking (mainly of examples), contradictory and there are way too many breaking changes. This makes searching quite ineffective since you'll have to check every single piece of code you see in-depth to make sure it still works.
chx 9y ago
> the query interface is awesome Huh! We started with MongoDB in 2009 and went live with it in 2010 (though I left that site in 2010) and as far as I am aware we were (one of?) the first paying customers of 10gen. I remember my boss joking about how he needed to press 10gen to actually accept money for support. I even contracted wtih MongoDB Inc in 2012-2015 but gosh, the query interface being awesome is not my experience for complex queries. Multiple $elemMatch makes for nightmare queries. Note: $elemMatch got added because we asked for the functionality but the syntax is not our making, that was Eliot. In fact, out of all MongoDB criticism https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mongodb-frankenstein-monster-nosql-databases-john-de-goes https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mongodb-frankenstein-monster-... this one is the one I sorta agree with (even if the author is reprehensible but let's try not get caught up on that).
- cervo 9y ago
  Agree and the other annoying thing is that the queries and most of the apis are not the same, so you work and build the query you want in JSON and now you need to go translate that to program code :( And vice versa, something is wrong with the query so if you want to figure it out and not be in a debugger you need to translate the code back to a query. There are libraries that accept the JSON but the standard one has an api that does not use the json queries directly.
- chx 9y ago
  typo: though I left that site in 2010 -- I meant 2011.

mrgordon 9y ago

If you’ve been using it since 2010, then your usage predates the aggregation framework. I’ll just state for the record that writing a JavaScript mapreduce (or telling a data scientist to write one) to count records is not a good experience. The other issue that got me was I was running queries that should have used an index but indexOnly kept coming back false. I dig into the Mongo JIRA and sure enough it was a bug and queries were returning incorrect values for whether they were using an index. The reason most people got mad at Mongo was probably their benchmark gaming though. They made unsafe writes the default for a long time so their default configuration benchmark would blow away SQL databases which fsync to disk by default (very reasonably!)

franciscop 9y ago

I have been using Mongoose for long enough (since 2012?) to have felt its pain point. The documentation is lacking (mainly of examples), contradictory and there are way too many breaking changes. This makes searching quite ineffective since you'll have to check every single piece of code you see in-depth to make sure it still works.

chx 9y ago

> the query interface is awesome Huh! We started with MongoDB in 2009 and went live with it in 2010 (though I left that site in 2010) and as far as I am aware we were (one of?) the first paying customers of 10gen. I remember my boss joking about how he needed to press 10gen to actually accept money for support. I even contracted wtih MongoDB Inc in 2012-2015 but gosh, the query interface being awesome is not my experience for complex queries. Multiple $elemMatch makes for nightmare queries. Note: $elemMatch got added because we asked for the functionality but the syntax is not our making, that was Eliot. In fact, out of all MongoDB criticism https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mongodb-frankenstein-monster-nosql-databases-john-de-goes https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mongodb-frankenstein-monster-... this one is the one I sorta agree with (even if the author is reprehensible but let's try not get caught up on that).

cervo 9y ago
Agree and the other annoying thing is that the queries and most of the apis are not the same, so you work and build the query you want in JSON and now you need to go translate that to program code :( And vice versa, something is wrong with the query so if you want to figure it out and not be in a debugger you need to translate the code back to a query. There are libraries that accept the JSON but the standard one has an api that does not use the json queries directly.
chx 9y ago
typo: though I left that site in 2010 -- I meant 2011.