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The irony of it all is that MongoDB actually matured and you do not have to jump through hoops to have, say, transactions. I am ALL for Postgres, I even wrote

The irony of it all is that MongoDB actually matured and you do not have to jump through hoops to have, say, transactions. I am ALL for Postgres, I even wrote a post about the importance of being fluent in relational databases: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-are-not-good-to-have.html https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-ar... What grinds my gears is the whiplash caused by this frantic stampede from one hype to the next. I am just waiting for the AI hype to blow over and for everyone to rediscover Hadoop, or something.

sph 3y ago
Postgres is no hype, it was already in plateau of productivity when MongoDB came to the web scale scene. Hadoop just like Mongo had their hyped time in the sun, but RDBMS are far too advanced and versatile than any of them were.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  I am not calling Postgres hype - it should have never been NOT hype. It's a reasonable default for most problems, Now all I read about is how Postgres is awesome, as if it's this great new thing. I guess that makes sense, as the new generation of engineers is rediscovering stable, reliable, lean technologies after a decade of excesses with "exotic" tech. For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all been?"
  - rendall 3y ago
    ...and, continuing the cycle next season, devs will (re)discover NoSQL and document DBMS. I do wonder if this phenomenon of trendy tech is somehow integral to advancing the state of the industry, the SWE equivalent of early adopters. "Rediscovering the old" is a side effect, as old tech is used and reinterpreted in new ways. Kind of neat, really.
    - Retric 3y ago
      There’s an entire industry of people selling knowledge of the “next great thing/the one true way," but they need a new thing every few years as people learned whatever the old thing was.
  - arp242 3y ago
    I remember Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob") going on about how No-SQL will replace literally all SQL and that there is literally not a single use case for relational data and SQL. I wonder if he ever came back on that. Now, my opinion of Martin in general is not especially high and he's a bit of a controversial figure, but it wasn't just the kids. And Martin is also all about reliable software, so that makes it even more surprising.
    - rjbwork 3y ago
      He's always been fundamentally a salesman. Hopping on the hype trains lets him sell more.
      - pydry 3y ago
        He's always been fundamentally a zealot who sees most narratives in black and white terms. It's an extremely unfortunate characteristic of a software engineer. It's the same reason he's so pro Trump I think.
        wesselbindt 3y ago
        The reason he says he voted for Trump is taxes. But that seems like a pretty flimsy reason. Have dems in the past couple decades ever reverted any republican-instated tax cuts for the wealthy/corporations, or even made any moves for tax bumps? In my experience dems are just republicans, except they wave a rainbow flag every now and then.
        arp242 3y ago
        I didn't even know about that; I checked his Twitter, and first thing is a reply to the Baltimore bridge collapse: > Doors and wheels fall off airplanes. Hundreds of illegal immigrants assault and overrun border guards in Texas. We can’t even muster support for our allies in the security council. But at least our pronouns are in order. https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/1772628692956545530 https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/177262869295654553... You really need to be a special sort of individual to go from a collapsed bridge to ranting about pronouns with no prompting or any prior mention of that. What a complete spanner.
  - sph 3y ago
    Excited, vocal users make the most noise. Somehow the entire Mongo DB era passed me through and I never used it once. I used to use MySQL in the 2000s, and switched to PostgreSQL in the 2010s.
    - benterix 3y ago
      You haven't missed much TBH. I think the only case where you'd use it in new projects in DynamoDB if you work with AWS.
      - finikytou 3y ago
        Dynamo is not mongo?
        benterix 3y ago
        No, DocumentDB is Mongo. What I understand the OP parent referred to is the NoSQL hype era, not just Mongo which was probably the most popular one at that time.
    - LtWorf 3y ago
      They used it at my 1st job, a startup. They had an ORM which made everything much slower, and the most common operation they did was to add items into lists, which causes the whole document to be resized and requires it to be moved. It could have been done with 1 sql server, but we needed 4 really heavy mongodb servers instead. And of course our code was buggy so the schema was all over the place.
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      My company considered it, but went with Cassandra instead.
  - tomnipotent 3y ago
    Postgres as we know it has only existed for about a decade, since the post-9.x era in 2010-2014 when many of its lauded features were added. Replication, heap-only tuples, extensions, foreign data wrappers, JSON, leveraging multiple indexes, parallel index scans, reindex concurrently, JIT compilation, declarative partitioning, stored procedures, and major WAL improvements are all "recent". I love Postgres and it's been my go-to default since 2014 and you can pry it from my cold dead hands, but it's more contemporary with Perl 6 than Perl 5 if we're talking grey beards.
    - Sesse__ 3y ago
      Extensions and stored procedures are not; they've been around for longer. I do not actually use any of the others you listed (well, occasionally bitmap index scans, but it's not a killer). The main difference between 8.x and 15.x for me is the small stream of optimizer features and tweaks (e.g. at some point, it started being able to reorder outer joins).
      - deleted 3y ago
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      - deleted 3y ago
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      - tomnipotent 3y ago
        Postgres 8 supported functions capable of returning tuples (RETURN QUERY), but lacked transaction control and other features that CREATE PROCEDURE added in Postgres 11 (2018). Extensions in Postgres 8 (and earlier) were also half-baked compared to 9.1 (2011), which added CREATE EXTENSION and other quality-of-life improvements including standardization. The latest complete implementations are what most people have in mind when talking about them.
        Sesse__ 3y ago
        Sure, there are improvements, but it's not like Postgres was a radically different beast back then. Would I pick Postgres 15 over Postgres 8? Yes, any day of the week. But I would also readily pick Postgres 8 over most of today's databases (including e.g. the latest MySQL and MongoDB versions), for most projects, if that was the choice I had.
  - benterix 3y ago
    > For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all been?" To be frank, PostgreSQL has evolved a lot since the late nineties. There was a time where people preferred MySQL over it at it seemed to work faster, certain things were easier and so on.
    - hibikir 3y ago
      I used postgres in the 90s. The biggest complaint was that postgres's default config needed a change so you could connect to it remotely, as the default, wisely at the time, decided that allowing connections from any IP by default before you changed any security setting whatsoever was a real problem. The MySQL performance advantages were large, with the small caveat that it was fast as long as you were using MyISAM, which achieved its speed by throwing away many safety features, like working transactions and foreign key constraints. Unsurprisingly, when eventually it got an engine that didn't throw caution to the wind, the performance advantage went away. I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s showing people whose that many of the issues they were facing with their e-commerce websites were ultimately down to the MySQL engine they had picked. But it's faster! Yes it is, but now your application code has to deal with all the things the engine has now offloaded to your application code. It's not that Postgres' changes were key to increasing market share, but that as MySQL matured, it had no options but to lose its 'advantages'.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        That mirrors my experience. MySQL was faster for use cases where data loss was acceptable. Will anyone die if you lose some web log analysis stats? Probably not. You wouldn’t want to use it for anything where guaranteed consistency was critical, like anything involving money, but it was an alright replacement for things like an in-memory data store. I say “was”. I hear it’s vastly better now.
        gkbrk 3y ago
        If you want a fast DB for web log analysis, you shouldn't look at MySQL or PostgreSQL anyway. ClickHouse will run circles around both of them for the use case of web log analysis.
  - forgotmyinfo 3y ago
    This is what happens when you hire 20-somethings who don't know how computers actually work to build your entire business. You either learn about relational databases in school, or through experience. Relational algebra has been around for half a century, at least. If someone doesn't know about its utility, it's a failure of the education system, or a failure of corporate incentives.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  MongoDB is more popular that it ever has been. You can look at their quarterly filings and learn this. The NoSQL space is larger than it ever has been and is the fastest growing segment in the database world.
debarshri 3y ago
Generally with these migrations biggest problem in my experience is that all the operational learnings are not transferrable. You often want to create expertise and achieve operational excellence with the tech that you start out.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  Back in the day we used to say "you choose your database once". You can swap in/out a lot of things, but your data store is really the core. It is shockingly hard to change your storage engine once you are serving customers, so you really want to get that right.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    Exactly, languages and frameworks come and go - but get the data layer right and you’re set.
thiht 3y ago
Postgres is not hype though. There's very few legitimate use cases for not using a RDBMS as a main data store, and Postgres happens to be the most popular nowadays, for good reasons.
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  The number one reason being that it’s free. In a purely technical comparison it is not at the top of the list.
  - simonw 3y ago
    What's top of the list technically?
    - bradleyjg 3y ago
      Oracle
      - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
        Anybody that has ever used Oracle knows how nice it is. But very few people have that experience because their company isn't spending millions of dollars on the database server.
        bradleyjg 3y ago
        Yes, that was my point. I get that working with Oracle and their army of lawyers is not cheap or pleasant but the db is still excellent.
      - pmarreck 3y ago
        Oracle is a giant mess, is the sense I got from trying to work with it in the past. While I am loathe to recommend any Microsoft product, SQL Server is at least coherent, and has actual transactions like Oracle (and not just "checkpoints")
bdzr 3y ago
> The irony of it all is that MongoDB actually matured and you do not have to jump through hoops to have, say, transactions. Are transactions still limited to a single document in Mongo?
- throwitaway1123 3y ago
  Mongo has had multi-document transactions since 2018 (version 4.0), and joins (the $lookup aggregation pipeline stage) since 2015 (version 3.2) [1]. [1] https://www.mongodb.com/evolved#mdbfourzero https://www.mongodb.com/evolved#mdbfourzero
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sph 3y ago

Postgres is no hype, it was already in plateau of productivity when MongoDB came to the web scale scene. Hadoop just like Mongo had their hyped time in the sun, but RDBMS are far too advanced and versatile than any of them were.

renegade-otter 3y ago
I am not calling Postgres hype - it should have never been NOT hype. It's a reasonable default for most problems, Now all I read about is how Postgres is awesome, as if it's this great new thing. I guess that makes sense, as the new generation of engineers is rediscovering stable, reliable, lean technologies after a decade of excesses with "exotic" tech. For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all been?"
- rendall 3y ago
  ...and, continuing the cycle next season, devs will (re)discover NoSQL and document DBMS. I do wonder if this phenomenon of trendy tech is somehow integral to advancing the state of the industry, the SWE equivalent of early adopters. "Rediscovering the old" is a side effect, as old tech is used and reinterpreted in new ways. Kind of neat, really.
  - Retric 3y ago
    There’s an entire industry of people selling knowledge of the “next great thing/the one true way," but they need a new thing every few years as people learned whatever the old thing was.
- arp242 3y ago
  I remember Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob") going on about how No-SQL will replace literally all SQL and that there is literally not a single use case for relational data and SQL. I wonder if he ever came back on that. Now, my opinion of Martin in general is not especially high and he's a bit of a controversial figure, but it wasn't just the kids. And Martin is also all about reliable software, so that makes it even more surprising.
  - rjbwork 3y ago
    He's always been fundamentally a salesman. Hopping on the hype trains lets him sell more.
    - pydry 3y ago
      He's always been fundamentally a zealot who sees most narratives in black and white terms. It's an extremely unfortunate characteristic of a software engineer. It's the same reason he's so pro Trump I think.
      - wesselbindt 3y ago
        The reason he says he voted for Trump is taxes. But that seems like a pretty flimsy reason. Have dems in the past couple decades ever reverted any republican-instated tax cuts for the wealthy/corporations, or even made any moves for tax bumps? In my experience dems are just republicans, except they wave a rainbow flag every now and then.
      - arp242 3y ago
        I didn't even know about that; I checked his Twitter, and first thing is a reply to the Baltimore bridge collapse: > Doors and wheels fall off airplanes. Hundreds of illegal immigrants assault and overrun border guards in Texas. We can’t even muster support for our allies in the security council. But at least our pronouns are in order. https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/1772628692956545530 https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/177262869295654553... You really need to be a special sort of individual to go from a collapsed bridge to ranting about pronouns with no prompting or any prior mention of that. What a complete spanner.
- sph 3y ago
  Excited, vocal users make the most noise. Somehow the entire Mongo DB era passed me through and I never used it once. I used to use MySQL in the 2000s, and switched to PostgreSQL in the 2010s.
  - benterix 3y ago
    You haven't missed much TBH. I think the only case where you'd use it in new projects in DynamoDB if you work with AWS.
    - finikytou 3y ago
      Dynamo is not mongo?
      - benterix 3y ago
        No, DocumentDB is Mongo. What I understand the OP parent referred to is the NoSQL hype era, not just Mongo which was probably the most popular one at that time.
  - LtWorf 3y ago
    They used it at my 1st job, a startup. They had an ORM which made everything much slower, and the most common operation they did was to add items into lists, which causes the whole document to be resized and requires it to be moved. It could have been done with 1 sql server, but we needed 4 really heavy mongodb servers instead. And of course our code was buggy so the schema was all over the place.
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    My company considered it, but went with Cassandra instead.
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  Postgres as we know it has only existed for about a decade, since the post-9.x era in 2010-2014 when many of its lauded features were added. Replication, heap-only tuples, extensions, foreign data wrappers, JSON, leveraging multiple indexes, parallel index scans, reindex concurrently, JIT compilation, declarative partitioning, stored procedures, and major WAL improvements are all "recent". I love Postgres and it's been my go-to default since 2014 and you can pry it from my cold dead hands, but it's more contemporary with Perl 6 than Perl 5 if we're talking grey beards.
  - Sesse__ 3y ago
    Extensions and stored procedures are not; they've been around for longer. I do not actually use any of the others you listed (well, occasionally bitmap index scans, but it's not a killer). The main difference between 8.x and 15.x for me is the small stream of optimizer features and tweaks (e.g. at some point, it started being able to reorder outer joins).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - tomnipotent 3y ago
      Postgres 8 supported functions capable of returning tuples (RETURN QUERY), but lacked transaction control and other features that CREATE PROCEDURE added in Postgres 11 (2018). Extensions in Postgres 8 (and earlier) were also half-baked compared to 9.1 (2011), which added CREATE EXTENSION and other quality-of-life improvements including standardization. The latest complete implementations are what most people have in mind when talking about them.
      - Sesse__ 3y ago
        Sure, there are improvements, but it's not like Postgres was a radically different beast back then. Would I pick Postgres 15 over Postgres 8? Yes, any day of the week. But I would also readily pick Postgres 8 over most of today's databases (including e.g. the latest MySQL and MongoDB versions), for most projects, if that was the choice I had.
- benterix 3y ago
  > For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all been?" To be frank, PostgreSQL has evolved a lot since the late nineties. There was a time where people preferred MySQL over it at it seemed to work faster, certain things were easier and so on.
  - hibikir 3y ago
    I used postgres in the 90s. The biggest complaint was that postgres's default config needed a change so you could connect to it remotely, as the default, wisely at the time, decided that allowing connections from any IP by default before you changed any security setting whatsoever was a real problem. The MySQL performance advantages were large, with the small caveat that it was fast as long as you were using MyISAM, which achieved its speed by throwing away many safety features, like working transactions and foreign key constraints. Unsurprisingly, when eventually it got an engine that didn't throw caution to the wind, the performance advantage went away. I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s showing people whose that many of the issues they were facing with their e-commerce websites were ultimately down to the MySQL engine they had picked. But it's faster! Yes it is, but now your application code has to deal with all the things the engine has now offloaded to your application code. It's not that Postgres' changes were key to increasing market share, but that as MySQL matured, it had no options but to lose its 'advantages'.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      That mirrors my experience. MySQL was faster for use cases where data loss was acceptable. Will anyone die if you lose some web log analysis stats? Probably not. You wouldn’t want to use it for anything where guaranteed consistency was critical, like anything involving money, but it was an alright replacement for things like an in-memory data store. I say “was”. I hear it’s vastly better now.
      - gkbrk 3y ago
        If you want a fast DB for web log analysis, you shouldn't look at MySQL or PostgreSQL anyway. ClickHouse will run circles around both of them for the use case of web log analysis.
- forgotmyinfo 3y ago
  This is what happens when you hire 20-somethings who don't know how computers actually work to build your entire business. You either learn about relational databases in school, or through experience. Relational algebra has been around for half a century, at least. If someone doesn't know about its utility, it's a failure of the education system, or a failure of corporate incentives.
nemo44x 3y ago
MongoDB is more popular that it ever has been. You can look at their quarterly filings and learn this. The NoSQL space is larger than it ever has been and is the fastest growing segment in the database world.

debarshri 3y ago

Generally with these migrations biggest problem in my experience is that all the operational learnings are not transferrable. You often want to create expertise and achieve operational excellence with the tech that you start out.

renegade-otter 3y ago
Back in the day we used to say "you choose your database once". You can swap in/out a lot of things, but your data store is really the core. It is shockingly hard to change your storage engine once you are serving customers, so you really want to get that right.
- cpursley 3y ago
  Exactly, languages and frameworks come and go - but get the data layer right and you’re set.

thiht 3y ago

Postgres is not hype though. There's very few legitimate use cases for not using a RDBMS as a main data store, and Postgres happens to be the most popular nowadays, for good reasons.

bradleyjg 3y ago
The number one reason being that it’s free. In a purely technical comparison it is not at the top of the list.
- simonw 3y ago
  What's top of the list technically?
  - bradleyjg 3y ago
    Oracle
    - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
      Anybody that has ever used Oracle knows how nice it is. But very few people have that experience because their company isn't spending millions of dollars on the database server.
      - bradleyjg 3y ago
        Yes, that was my point. I get that working with Oracle and their army of lawyers is not cheap or pleasant but the db is still excellent.
    - pmarreck 3y ago
      Oracle is a giant mess, is the sense I got from trying to work with it in the past. While I am loathe to recommend any Microsoft product, SQL Server is at least coherent, and has actual transactions like Oracle (and not just "checkpoints")

bdzr 3y ago

> The irony of it all is that MongoDB actually matured and you do not have to jump through hoops to have, say, transactions. Are transactions still limited to a single document in Mongo?

throwitaway1123 3y ago
Mongo has had multi-document transactions since 2018 (version 4.0), and joins (the $lookup aggregation pipeline stage) since 2015 (version 3.2) [1]. [1] https://www.mongodb.com/evolved#mdbfourzero https://www.mongodb.com/evolved#mdbfourzero

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]