3 ms·

Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?

3 points by omarfarooq 5y ago

rektide 5y ago
> Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? Unanswered, & not even an attempt was made. There's a bunch of numbers at the beginning tracking it's meteoric rise & showing adoption, but nothing to discuss why. I still wouldn't pick MongoDB but I still have huge huge huge respect for a rest-ful first datastore, for http+json as the lowest impedance way to read and write data. If anything it was just too easy to use, to get started with, and standards patterns/libraries/tools for data-control not adopted quickly nor widely enough. The article mentions the rise of the MEAN stack (mongo express angular node) but doesn't really comment on what or why of this. But I think it iconifies how different things were with MongoDB versus before. What was so different was that, in some ways, one almost didn't need express/node: a well compiled website with apache httpd and mongo could in some cases be sufficient, or nearly sufficient to run a variety of apps. Because the database already spoke web, already stored & retrieved JSON documents. MongoDB was easy to learn, because it looked like the rest of the levels of the stack: it was about using the world-wide verbs we have to manipulate the data we have. Where-as most other databases, there is an impedance mismatch: we have to convert to other protocols, to other query languages, to other data-models. I think there's still so much lost by having databases have their own protocols. There's neat attempts like PostgREST and pgrest & others to try to bring back some of this out-of-the-box web-native access, but overall it feels our expectations for how & where data gets stored still hinge around more special purpose protocols & means, are not tailored to the first two tiers of the three tier architecture that they still, to this day, anchor down.
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  In a word the reason MongoDB was and is popular is "objects." Objects are hard to store and retrieve in relational databases, despite countless attempts to make it work. In MongoDB you just pop them into a table and fetch them back as needed. You don't need to define schema. In fact, you don't even need to define tables. MongoDB creates them automatically. It's still surprising to me how many people don't see how great this is for full stack developers. It makes up for a lot of other sins.
znpy 5y ago
«mongodb is webscale» /s

3 points by omarfarooq 5y ago

> Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? Unanswered, & not even an attempt was made. There's a bunch of numbers at the beginning tracking it's meteoric rise & showing adoption, but nothing to discuss why. I still wouldn't pick MongoDB but I still have huge huge huge respect for a rest-ful first datastore, for http+json as the lowest impedance way to read and write data. If anything it was just too easy to use, to get started with, and standards patterns/libraries/tools for data-control not adopted quickly nor widely enough. The article mentions the rise of the MEAN stack (mongo express angular node) but doesn't really comment on what or why of this. But I think it iconifies how different things were with MongoDB versus before. What was so different was that, in some ways, one almost didn't need express/node: a well compiled website with apache httpd and mongo could in some cases be sufficient, or nearly sufficient to run a variety of apps. Because the database already spoke web, already stored & retrieved JSON documents. MongoDB was easy to learn, because it looked like the rest of the levels of the stack: it was about using the world-wide verbs we have to manipulate the data we have. Where-as most other databases, there is an impedance mismatch: we have to convert to other protocols, to other query languages, to other data-models. I think there's still so much lost by having databases have their own protocols. There's neat attempts like PostgREST and pgrest & others to try to bring back some of this out-of-the-box web-native access, but overall it feels our expectations for how & where data gets stored still hinge around more special purpose protocols & means, are not tailored to the first two tiers of the three tier architecture that they still, to this day, anchor down.

hodgesrm 5y ago
In a word the reason MongoDB was and is popular is "objects." Objects are hard to store and retrieve in relational databases, despite countless attempts to make it work. In MongoDB you just pop them into a table and fetch them back as needed. You don't need to define schema. In fact, you don't even need to define tables. MongoDB creates them automatically. It's still surprising to me how many people don't see how great this is for full stack developers. It makes up for a lot of other sins.

znpy 5y ago

«mongodb is webscale» /s