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Why are people still using Mongo when you can just set up a jsonb column in Postgres now? Is this just legacy applications that are stuck with Mongo? Certainly

Why are people still using Mongo when you can just set up a jsonb column in Postgres now? Is this just legacy applications that are stuck with Mongo? Certainly nobody is starting new projects on Mongo? Serious question.

reilly3000 4y ago
It has great performance characteristics for the use cases it’s best at.
cglace 4y ago
It's easier to setup a mongo HA cluster? Having used both, I personally would never choose mongo over Postgres, there are just too many conveniences Postgres offers that are a pain with Mongo.
pc86 4y ago
Why would you have a dev team who has used mongo before and is comfortable with it move to a different DB? Serious question.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 4y ago
  IMO it's already a problem if my team is more knowledgeable about mongo than postgres. It means I'm exclusively hiring from a weird pool.
slt2021 4y ago
same as why people use Oracle/SQL Server when there is free SQLite? because that is how they compare feature wise. postgres is not easily comparable to mongo, these are totally different db engines with different tradeoffs made for different purposes.
- mnd999 4y ago
  SQLite isn’t really comparable to Oracle or SQL Server though. It’s an embedded database. Probably you meant Postgres there too?
  - slt2021 4y ago
    same with postgres's jsonb - it is not comparable to mongo at all, they dont have any feature parity
    - tengbretson 4y ago
      > they dont have any feature parity They very obviously have a significant degree of feature parity.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Oracle and SQL Server are also embedded databases that happen to have a networking layer on top. And, given the context, a networking layer is likely what you're building anyway.
mnd999 4y ago
Mongo will scale out horizontally better than Postgres. But most people don’t need that, and there are other alternatives to Mongo that will also scale in this way.
viridian 4y ago
In the vast majority of cases these days I'd rather have a dumb document database to shove my data into rather than fretting over relationships between tables with a RMDBS where complexity grows at best, quadratically. I don't use mongodb in particular but I never want to go back to worrying about what a SQL application instance is up to, either.
janee 4y ago
I found having big doc store tables in Postgres became harder to manage as time went by from a people perspective. E.g. around the 300GB mark I had to constantly remind myself and others to be careful of it because it might have normal relational columns you think are fine to query, but it also has a fat json payload on each row and if you're careless the query planner would basically do a table scan for things you wouldn't expect. This isn't so much a problem with json in an rdbms but more the false sense of query performance on non-json columns in the same table...after moving it to mongo never had the same problems because people knew not to query it in an unsupported manner.
- cpursley 4y ago
  Interesting, something to keep in mind!

reilly3000 4y ago

It has great performance characteristics for the use cases it’s best at.

cglace 4y ago

It's easier to setup a mongo HA cluster? Having used both, I personally would never choose mongo over Postgres, there are just too many conveniences Postgres offers that are a pain with Mongo.

pc86 4y ago

Why would you have a dev team who has used mongo before and is comfortable with it move to a different DB? Serious question.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 4y ago
IMO it's already a problem if my team is more knowledgeable about mongo than postgres. It means I'm exclusively hiring from a weird pool.

slt2021 4y ago

same as why people use Oracle/SQL Server when there is free SQLite? because that is how they compare feature wise. postgres is not easily comparable to mongo, these are totally different db engines with different tradeoffs made for different purposes.

mnd999 4y ago
SQLite isn’t really comparable to Oracle or SQL Server though. It’s an embedded database. Probably you meant Postgres there too?
- slt2021 4y ago
  same with postgres's jsonb - it is not comparable to mongo at all, they dont have any feature parity
  - tengbretson 4y ago
    > they dont have any feature parity They very obviously have a significant degree of feature parity.
- randomdata 4y ago
  Oracle and SQL Server are also embedded databases that happen to have a networking layer on top. And, given the context, a networking layer is likely what you're building anyway.

mnd999 4y ago

Mongo will scale out horizontally better than Postgres. But most people don’t need that, and there are other alternatives to Mongo that will also scale in this way.

viridian 4y ago

In the vast majority of cases these days I'd rather have a dumb document database to shove my data into rather than fretting over relationships between tables with a RMDBS where complexity grows at best, quadratically. I don't use mongodb in particular but I never want to go back to worrying about what a SQL application instance is up to, either.

janee 4y ago

I found having big doc store tables in Postgres became harder to manage as time went by from a people perspective. E.g. around the 300GB mark I had to constantly remind myself and others to be careful of it because it might have normal relational columns you think are fine to query, but it also has a fat json payload on each row and if you're careless the query planner would basically do a table scan for things you wouldn't expect. This isn't so much a problem with json in an rdbms but more the false sense of query performance on non-json columns in the same table...after moving it to mongo never had the same problems because people knew not to query it in an unsupported manner.

cpursley 4y ago
Interesting, something to keep in mind!