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> Being ignorant of SQL and attracted by the "flexibility" of schema-less data stores powered by javascript is definitely the wrong reason to look at Mongo. It

by camus2 13y ago

> Being ignorant of SQL and attracted by the "flexibility" of schema-less data stores powered by javascript is definitely the wrong reason to look at Mongo. It's usually the only reason. And 10gen were good at marketing it.

mattkrea 13y ago
I think a lot of people (at least in the Node community) love the interfaces provided for it and specifically Mongoose which allows you to enforce a schema and thus relational data. I'll admit that I originally got into it because I didn't really know SQL and I'm still not very talented with it but for example.. Joins in Mongoose? Say there is a comment.. this comment has an author. If that author is type ObjectId when I run a query I can do this: model.comment.find({_id: <some id>}).populate('author').exec(e, result) { // author will be populated with that author's data instead of just the ID }
- camus2 13y ago
  I use mongodb only when i have to write an app in Node. Not because it's the better solution , but because mongoose is the only library that deals with data that is mature on npm. The rest is beta at best and drivers for RDBMS are not mature enough.
  - mattkrea 13y ago
    I had thought the mysql drivers were all more mature or is it that you lean more toward postgresql?
  - hoffer 13y ago
    The mysql driver on NPM is indeed mature. Been using it with out issue for a couple years now in a large app. https://npmjs.org/package/mysql https://npmjs.org/package/mysql
chadcf 13y ago
I used it for exactly one production app and it was a huge success. The reason I used it was because the data we needed to represent was actually a document, in this case a representation of fillable form fields in a pdf document. The basic structure was that documents had sections and sections had fields and fields had values, types, formatters, options, etc. Initially trying to come up with a schema in SQL was somewhat painful as what I was really looking for was an object store. Switching to mongo gave me a way to do a very clean, simple solution that worked quite well for the problem at hand (representing pdf forms). That said, we also played it very safe and used mongo for only the document portion, with every other part of the system being in an sql database. But for the doucuments mongo worked really well as a basic object store without the complexity of something like Neo4j.
- idProQuo 13y ago
  For all the talk about how "MongoDB totally has SOME use cases", I've never before heard of a use case where it would be unambiguously better to use a document store. Thanks for explaining that so well.
  - threeseed 13y ago
    I've used it well in the past as well. MongoDB was 5-10x faster than PostgreSQL, Cassandra etc. If your domain model is structured like a document then MongoDB is a pretty great fit.
  - leccine 13y ago
    Even if it is better, why Mongo? Why not Riak?
- tensor 13y ago
  Of course, a better choice now would be to use PostgreSQL's new JSON support. Postgres has also had XML document types for a long time, though I'm not sure of their indexing story. If you don't need indexing into the document, you can easily just store it as serialized bytea data. I've done this quite frequently and it works wonderfully.
yayitswei 13y ago
In my opinion, datalog (via Datomic) strikes a good balance between schema flexibility and queryability. It's my preferred way of working with data now, after using Mongo for a year (I was also initially attracted by the flexibility of schema-less data stores).

by camus2 13y ago

mattkrea 13y ago

I think a lot of people (at least in the Node community) love the interfaces provided for it and specifically Mongoose which allows you to enforce a schema and thus relational data. I'll admit that I originally got into it because I didn't really know SQL and I'm still not very talented with it but for example.. Joins in Mongoose? Say there is a comment.. this comment has an author. If that author is type ObjectId when I run a query I can do this: model.comment.find({_id: <some id>}).populate('author').exec(e, result) { // author will be populated with that author's data instead of just the ID }

camus2 13y ago
I use mongodb only when i have to write an app in Node. Not because it's the better solution , but because mongoose is the only library that deals with data that is mature on npm. The rest is beta at best and drivers for RDBMS are not mature enough.
- mattkrea 13y ago
  I had thought the mysql drivers were all more mature or is it that you lean more toward postgresql?
- hoffer 13y ago
  The mysql driver on NPM is indeed mature. Been using it with out issue for a couple years now in a large app. https://npmjs.org/package/mysql https://npmjs.org/package/mysql

chadcf 13y ago

I used it for exactly one production app and it was a huge success. The reason I used it was because the data we needed to represent was actually a document, in this case a representation of fillable form fields in a pdf document. The basic structure was that documents had sections and sections had fields and fields had values, types, formatters, options, etc. Initially trying to come up with a schema in SQL was somewhat painful as what I was really looking for was an object store. Switching to mongo gave me a way to do a very clean, simple solution that worked quite well for the problem at hand (representing pdf forms). That said, we also played it very safe and used mongo for only the document portion, with every other part of the system being in an sql database. But for the doucuments mongo worked really well as a basic object store without the complexity of something like Neo4j.

idProQuo 13y ago
For all the talk about how "MongoDB totally has SOME use cases", I've never before heard of a use case where it would be unambiguously better to use a document store. Thanks for explaining that so well.
- threeseed 13y ago
  I've used it well in the past as well. MongoDB was 5-10x faster than PostgreSQL, Cassandra etc. If your domain model is structured like a document then MongoDB is a pretty great fit.
- leccine 13y ago
  Even if it is better, why Mongo? Why not Riak?
tensor 13y ago
Of course, a better choice now would be to use PostgreSQL's new JSON support. Postgres has also had XML document types for a long time, though I'm not sure of their indexing story. If you don't need indexing into the document, you can easily just store it as serialized bytea data. I've done this quite frequently and it works wonderfully.

yayitswei 13y ago

In my opinion, datalog (via Datomic) strikes a good balance between schema flexibility and queryability. It's my preferred way of working with data now, after using Mongo for a year (I was also initially attracted by the flexibility of schema-less data stores).