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I wouldn’t say this is something it got right - actually something it got wrong! I have never worked with a company that was sunk by the cost of migrating data

I wouldn’t say this is something it got right - actually something it got wrong! I have never worked with a company that was sunk by the cost of migrating data between schemas. I have, however, worked with companies where the bugs that come with a schemaless database have almost sunk it. YMMV of course but I think it’s a false trade-off. I would say that the developer experience was good in the sense that it was very easy to replicate Mongo databases - but that’s more of a system administration thing. I honestly don’t think that schemaless databases add any real value.

dfcowell 9y ago
We're going through hell right now because the system I inherited uses Mongo for order/transaction/inventory data which benefits HUGELY from being stored in an ACID-compliant database, even when you ignore the fact that the data is highly relational and perfectly suited to a "boring" SQL DB. Mongo has its place, but its place isn't in most line-of-business applications for SMEs. "Pick the right tool for the job" has been the biggest casualty in the midst of the schemaless hype we're going through right now.
- bonesss 9y ago
  > "Pick the right tool for the job" has been the biggest casualty in the midst of the schemaless hype we're going through right now. Even getting to the point of realizing that most domains where NoSQL or schemaless solutions thrive are also domains where you need to be thinking in suites of persistence technology, ie where trying to choose a single data persistence technology is crazy, would be a big step. A beast like Reddit (for example), has clear areas where a document centered schemaless approach would yield big wins, but that doesn't mean it's ideal for handling their advertising billing or their master data. "The job" is quite often many smaller jobs, each of which needs it's own tool. Sometimes it's a lot easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.

dfcowell 9y ago

We're going through hell right now because the system I inherited uses Mongo for order/transaction/inventory data which benefits HUGELY from being stored in an ACID-compliant database, even when you ignore the fact that the data is highly relational and perfectly suited to a "boring" SQL DB. Mongo has its place, but its place isn't in most line-of-business applications for SMEs. "Pick the right tool for the job" has been the biggest casualty in the midst of the schemaless hype we're going through right now.

bonesss 9y ago
> "Pick the right tool for the job" has been the biggest casualty in the midst of the schemaless hype we're going through right now. Even getting to the point of realizing that most domains where NoSQL or schemaless solutions thrive are also domains where you need to be thinking in suites of persistence technology, ie where trying to choose a single data persistence technology is crazy, would be a big step. A beast like Reddit (for example), has clear areas where a document centered schemaless approach would yield big wins, but that doesn't mean it's ideal for handling their advertising billing or their master data. "The job" is quite often many smaller jobs, each of which needs it's own tool. Sometimes it's a lot easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.