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DynamoDB is a lot more explicit about its tradeoffs. Much of the backlash against Mongo was because it basically claimed to be well-suited to any use case, when

DynamoDB is a lot more explicit about its tradeoffs. Much of the backlash against Mongo was because it basically claimed to be well-suited to any use case, when its sweet spot was really far narrower. To be successful with Mongo, you need to design the entire app around its limitations, but those limitations were initially downplayed and obscured. People were convinced that Mongo was a good choice as a default, general purpose db, when it clearly wasn’t for about a million reasons. I don’t think DynamoDB is marketed or viewed in the same way. The docs are pretty clear about needing to design your data model to specifically work well with Dynamo. People using it seem to generally be aware of its limitations, and deliberately choose to accept them for the sake of performance and scalability. At least that’s my perception.

hartror 6y ago
What are those good use-cases for mongo?
- danenania 6y ago
  Basically when speed and horizontal scalability are very important, and consistency/durability are less important. It’s also pretty good for unstructured or irregularly structured data that’s hard to write a schema for. Web scraping or data ingestion from apis might be a reasonable use case. Or maybe consumer apps/games where occasional data loss or inconsistency isn’t a big deal. It can also be used effectively as a kind of durable cache (with a nice query language) in place of redis/memcached if you give it plenty of ram. While its guarantees or lack thereof aren’t great for a database, they’re pretty good for a cache.
- jaydestro 6y ago
  I worked for a big news website- we used mongodb for pixel tracking data. I went on to work at mongodb
rumanator 6y ago
> I don’t think DynamoDB is marketed or viewed in the same way. The docs are pretty clear about needing to design your data model to specifically work well with Dynamo. More importantly, AWS is very explicit in letting newcomers be perfectly aware that DynamoDB's usecases are, that they are very specific niche use cases, and that if users require schemas and joins then they should just stick with either relational databases or graph databases. Those who overpromise will always disappoint.

hartror 6y ago

What are those good use-cases for mongo?

danenania 6y ago
Basically when speed and horizontal scalability are very important, and consistency/durability are less important. It’s also pretty good for unstructured or irregularly structured data that’s hard to write a schema for. Web scraping or data ingestion from apis might be a reasonable use case. Or maybe consumer apps/games where occasional data loss or inconsistency isn’t a big deal. It can also be used effectively as a kind of durable cache (with a nice query language) in place of redis/memcached if you give it plenty of ram. While its guarantees or lack thereof aren’t great for a database, they’re pretty good for a cache.
jaydestro 6y ago
I worked for a big news website- we used mongodb for pixel tracking data. I went on to work at mongodb

rumanator 6y ago

> I don’t think DynamoDB is marketed or viewed in the same way. The docs are pretty clear about needing to design your data model to specifically work well with Dynamo. More importantly, AWS is very explicit in letting newcomers be perfectly aware that DynamoDB's usecases are, that they are very specific niche use cases, and that if users require schemas and joins then they should just stick with either relational databases or graph databases. Those who overpromise will always disappoint.