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It really was the first NoSQL database that many programmers used -- and it came out right around the same time that JSON was really taking off. The timing was

It really was the first NoSQL database that many programmers used -- and it came out right around the same time that JSON was really taking off. The timing was perfect, the product was simple. Fact is most people don't really need insane scale and there are thousands of use cases where you just need to read and write JSON and fetch things by a few different fields. I think they nailed it. Every other NoSQL DB out there at the time was insanely hard to "just play with" (e.g HBase, Cassandra etc.) I think you hit the nail on the head -- for many programmers who were "coming of age" at that time Mongo was the easiest to experiment with and to get working.

devdad 9y ago
This is me - I had taken SQL at uni and found MongoDB to be much easier to reason about since I knew my frontend parts already. One of the apps I've built has a terrible database structure (my first real life server setup!), and is probably the worst codebase I've ever written. I will never show it publicly. It currently serves 100k+ users and the users have no idea how messed up the server code is. It won't scale to a million users, but that's okay and the technology served me well as a junior. I since turned to RethinkDB and sometimes just a classic SQL will do, but Mongo is really easy to get started with.
pessimizer 9y ago
> It really was the first NoSQL database that many programmers used That was because it was heavily marketed, not because of timing. > Mongo was the easiest to experiment with and to get working. It really wasn't, it was the one they had heard about.