4 ms·

No, when things change fast and unpredictably, NoSQL is worse than when they are well-known and stable. NoSQL gains you no speed at all in redesigning your sys

No, when things change fast and unpredictably, NoSQL is worse than when they are well-known and stable. NoSQL gains you no speed at all in redesigning your system. Instead, you trade a few hard to do tasks in data migration into an unsurmountable mess of data inconsistency bugs that you'll never actually get into the end of. > is mostly bad design decisions and poor domain knowledge Yes, using NoSQL to avoid data migrations is a bad design decision. Usually created by poor general knowledge.

james_marks 7mo ago
If the argument for NoSQL is, “we don’t know what our schema is going to be”, stop. Stop and go ask more questions until you have a better understanding of the problem.
- jampekka 7mo ago
  Oftentimes better understanding of the problem needs trying out solutions. Armchair architectures tend to blow up in contact with reality.
  - freedomben 7mo ago
    For sure, though with databases it's usually pretty clear even at the start whether your "objects" will be relational in nature. I can't think of a single time that hasn't been the case, over hundreds of apps/services I've been part of. Things like asynchronous jobs, message queues, even object storage, I fully agree though.
- ranger_danger 7mo ago
  Even a JSON column would be better in most cases IMO, and on Postgres you can also make indexes on json keys.
leafarlua 7mo ago
Makes sense. But in this case, why NoSQL exists? What problems does it resolves and when should it be considered? I'm being naive, but fast changing environment has been one of the main advantages that I was taught from devs when it comes to NoSQL vs SQL (nosql being the choice for flexible schemas). So it is more about BASE vs ACID?
- marcosdumay 7mo ago
  NoSQL was created to deal with scales where ACID becomes a bottleneck. It also shown itself useful for dealing with data that don't actually have an schema. If you have either of those problems, you will know it very clearly. Also, ironically, Postgres became one of the most scalable NoSQL bases out there, and one of the most flexible to use unstructured data too.
  - freedomben 7mo ago
    Agreed. In my experience (YMMV), there was also a real adoption push in the js world from primarily front-end people that wanted to do some backend but didn't want to learn/deal with SQL databases. I don't say that with malice, I was also on-board the NoSQL train for a bit before I actually gained experience with the headaches it caused. The appeal of "just dump your JSON blob straight in" was (and still is) strong. Software is all about learning, and sometimes that learning is expensive. We've all built something we later regretted.
- gf000 7mo ago
  Probably the best use case would be something like a Facebook profile page for a given user. It may not have a very rigid schema, you may later add several other optional fields. You need very large scale (as in no of concurrent accesses), you want to shard the data by e.g. location. But also, the data is not "critical", your highschool not being visible temporarily for certain users is not an issue. You mostly use the whole dataset "at the same time", you don't do a lot of WHERE, JOIN on some nested value. In every other case I would rather reach for postgres with a JSONB column.
- yfontana 7mo ago
  As a data architect I dislike the term NoSQL and often recommend that my coworkers not use it in technical discussions, as it is too vague. Document, key-value and graph DBs are usually considered NoSQL, but they have fairly different use cases (and I'd argue that search DBs like Elastic / OpenSearch are in their own category as well). To me write scaling is the main current advantage of KV and document DBs. They can generally do schema evolution fairly easily, but nowadays so can many SQL DBs, with semi-structured column types. Also, you need to keep in mind that KV and document DBs are (mostly) non-relational. The more relational your data, the less likely you are to actually benefit from using those DBs over a relational, SQL DB.

james_marks 7mo ago

If the argument for NoSQL is, “we don’t know what our schema is going to be”, stop. Stop and go ask more questions until you have a better understanding of the problem.

jampekka 7mo ago
Oftentimes better understanding of the problem needs trying out solutions. Armchair architectures tend to blow up in contact with reality.
- freedomben 7mo ago
  For sure, though with databases it's usually pretty clear even at the start whether your "objects" will be relational in nature. I can't think of a single time that hasn't been the case, over hundreds of apps/services I've been part of. Things like asynchronous jobs, message queues, even object storage, I fully agree though.
ranger_danger 7mo ago
Even a JSON column would be better in most cases IMO, and on Postgres you can also make indexes on json keys.

leafarlua 7mo ago

Makes sense. But in this case, why NoSQL exists? What problems does it resolves and when should it be considered? I'm being naive, but fast changing environment has been one of the main advantages that I was taught from devs when it comes to NoSQL vs SQL (nosql being the choice for flexible schemas). So it is more about BASE vs ACID?

marcosdumay 7mo ago
NoSQL was created to deal with scales where ACID becomes a bottleneck. It also shown itself useful for dealing with data that don't actually have an schema. If you have either of those problems, you will know it very clearly. Also, ironically, Postgres became one of the most scalable NoSQL bases out there, and one of the most flexible to use unstructured data too.
- freedomben 7mo ago
  Agreed. In my experience (YMMV), there was also a real adoption push in the js world from primarily front-end people that wanted to do some backend but didn't want to learn/deal with SQL databases. I don't say that with malice, I was also on-board the NoSQL train for a bit before I actually gained experience with the headaches it caused. The appeal of "just dump your JSON blob straight in" was (and still is) strong. Software is all about learning, and sometimes that learning is expensive. We've all built something we later regretted.
gf000 7mo ago
Probably the best use case would be something like a Facebook profile page for a given user. It may not have a very rigid schema, you may later add several other optional fields. You need very large scale (as in no of concurrent accesses), you want to shard the data by e.g. location. But also, the data is not "critical", your highschool not being visible temporarily for certain users is not an issue. You mostly use the whole dataset "at the same time", you don't do a lot of WHERE, JOIN on some nested value. In every other case I would rather reach for postgres with a JSONB column.
yfontana 7mo ago
As a data architect I dislike the term NoSQL and often recommend that my coworkers not use it in technical discussions, as it is too vague. Document, key-value and graph DBs are usually considered NoSQL, but they have fairly different use cases (and I'd argue that search DBs like Elastic / OpenSearch are in their own category as well). To me write scaling is the main current advantage of KV and document DBs. They can generally do schema evolution fairly easily, but nowadays so can many SQL DBs, with semi-structured column types. Also, you need to keep in mind that KV and document DBs are (mostly) non-relational. The more relational your data, the less likely you are to actually benefit from using those DBs over a relational, SQL DB.