For all the people asking "why don't people just use DynamoDB, BigTable, etc. if they need NoSQL", there are a few incorrect assumptions here-- 1) People need

For all the people asking "why don't people just use DynamoDB, BigTable, etc. if they need NoSQL", there are a few incorrect assumptions here-- 1) People need NoSQL. This is rarely the case. That said, Mongo often lets you model structures how you think so it's nice for prototyping. I'm very comfortable with SQL so I wouldn't do this anymore, but I could see value in it once upon a time, especially if you're already using JS across the stack. 2) DynamoDB is not the same at all. Its query and sharding models are entirely different. In most cases, it does NOT allow you to model something usable how you think. Don't get me wrong-- it's a great technology, and we get a lot of value out of it at work, but if you're directly comparing the two, you probably haven't actually used it enough.