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MongoDB is a database with some properties that match a specific niche, but to gain popularity they marketed it as a general purpose database that anyone could

by tinco 12y ago

MongoDB is a database with some properties that match a specific niche, but to gain popularity they marketed it as a general purpose database that anyone could use. The result is that many developers who bought into the hype train are now salty because they encountered the limitations at unexpected and unfortunate moments that might have cost them uptime or data.

harel 12y ago
Or in other words: Developers bought into the hype without checking the facts or reading the manual. Same attitude causes people to change frameworks every 2 days, refactor code bases three time a week and generally be flippant about technology, depending on what is cool this hour.
erispoe 12y ago
Can you elaborate on these limitations?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I agree about MongoDB being for specific niches. I have used it for offline analytics (writes to a master, with slaves on different servers performing different analytics) and also on my laptop to collect training text and for storing intermediate results (small amount of data, the JSON document format was handy for my application). I was very happy with it for those applications. For most applications I usually use Postgres.
savanaly 12y ago
Thanks for the helpful answer. What was the specific niche it was filling, and why is it not practical for other cases? Or if you don't feel like repeating this info for the zillionth time, is it explained in an essay or blog post somewhere? My googling turned up little.
gaius 12y ago
It is also the case that it was advertised to developers with the promise that you don't need Ops or DBAs or anyone like that. These developers found it did indeed work well for 1 developer on 1 machine working on 1 app with 1 very simple database accessed on 1 connection. Then they chucked it over the fence to Ops who were expected to make it work in Production, and everything about it was found to be woefully inadequate, and the Ops guys were forced to carry the can. Those guys feel - quite rightly - that they were shafted by MongoDB, both the company and its fans.

by tinco 12y ago

harel 12y ago

Or in other words: Developers bought into the hype without checking the facts or reading the manual. Same attitude causes people to change frameworks every 2 days, refactor code bases three time a week and generally be flippant about technology, depending on what is cool this hour.

erispoe 12y ago

Can you elaborate on these limitations?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I agree about MongoDB being for specific niches. I have used it for offline analytics (writes to a master, with slaves on different servers performing different analytics) and also on my laptop to collect training text and for storing intermediate results (small amount of data, the JSON document format was handy for my application). I was very happy with it for those applications. For most applications I usually use Postgres.

savanaly 12y ago

Thanks for the helpful answer. What was the specific niche it was filling, and why is it not practical for other cases? Or if you don't feel like repeating this info for the zillionth time, is it explained in an essay or blog post somewhere? My googling turned up little.

gaius 12y ago

It is also the case that it was advertised to developers with the promise that you don't need Ops or DBAs or anyone like that. These developers found it did indeed work well for 1 developer on 1 machine working on 1 app with 1 very simple database accessed on 1 connection. Then they chucked it over the fence to Ops who were expected to make it work in Production, and everything about it was found to be woefully inadequate, and the Ops guys were forced to carry the can. Those guys feel - quite rightly - that they were shafted by MongoDB, both the company and its fans.