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But the point is that there is no use case. Relational databases and normalisation didn't arise because a load of neckbeards wanted bad performance and extra co

But the point is that there is no use case. Relational databases and normalisation didn't arise because a load of neckbeards wanted bad performance and extra complexity. The point of the article is that the world is relational, and because Mongo isn't, it'll bite you in the ass eventual. Sure, that's a specialisation of what you said, but still a useful one, as it allows you to immediately know you shouldn't use Mongo (unless your data is all truly non-relational, and you know you'll never integrate it with any relational data, which, without a crystal ball, you can't know, so don't use it.)

btown 13y ago
As soon as you have users, you'll want to handle relationships between users, whether that's outward-facing or for internal analytics. All products have users by definition. Therefore...
exelius 13y ago
There is a use case, but internet hype has gotten everyone wanting to use Mongo when there's no real reason to. Postgres scales nearly as well as Mongo while being a lot more flexible. That said, Mongo has some real benefits for non-relational computing (see mapreduce) that could make some of the abstraction headaches and lack of data model flexibility worth it for very large data sets. But I sort of agree; Mongo tends to be overused by startups who are trying to solve a scalability / performance problem before they have one. In the process they often end up running into data model limitations because stuff moves fast early on and you can't foresee what you'll need in a year.
twic 13y ago
Yes. There seem to be a lot of people with quite poor reading comprehension commenting here. The case that the article makes is something like: 1. Document stores are no good for data with non-strictly-hierarchical structure 2. All interesting data has some non-strictly-hierarchical structure The first point is common knowledge nowadays. It's really the second point that is interesting. Moreover, interesting and correct.

btown 13y ago

As soon as you have users, you'll want to handle relationships between users, whether that's outward-facing or for internal analytics. All products have users by definition. Therefore...

exelius 13y ago

There is a use case, but internet hype has gotten everyone wanting to use Mongo when there's no real reason to. Postgres scales nearly as well as Mongo while being a lot more flexible. That said, Mongo has some real benefits for non-relational computing (see mapreduce) that could make some of the abstraction headaches and lack of data model flexibility worth it for very large data sets. But I sort of agree; Mongo tends to be overused by startups who are trying to solve a scalability / performance problem before they have one. In the process they often end up running into data model limitations because stuff moves fast early on and you can't foresee what you'll need in a year.

twic 13y ago

Yes. There seem to be a lot of people with quite poor reading comprehension commenting here. The case that the article makes is something like: 1. Document stores are no good for data with non-strictly-hierarchical structure 2. All interesting data has some non-strictly-hierarchical structure The first point is common knowledge nowadays. It's really the second point that is interesting. Moreover, interesting and correct.