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by kenwalger 3264 days ago
These "Why technology X is worthless" types of posts and statements always give me a bit of a laugh. As with most technologies, there is a) a learning curve, and b) best practices to follow.

Many of the comments here seem to discuss a few things which, in my opinion, lead me to believe that the implementation is incorrect or decisions are being made on old data or based on older versions of MongoDB. Making arguments against any product based on previous versions seems to be counter productive. Most of the posts here don't make reference to a specific MongoDB version, but many reference their experience with the product in 2012.

Assuming that these experiences were at the end of 2012 with the most current at the time version, we are still talking about version 2.2.2. The current stable version is 3.4.6. As you can imagine, there have been many advances to the product in five years. Basing one's knowledge and opinion of MongoDB on old versions doesn't seem logical. Even back in 2012 though, there was a lot of misinformation about MongoDB. A blog post from that time period (https://blog.serverdensity.com/does-everyone-hate-mongodb/) argues some of that information at that time.

Many other comments were made based on what seems to be a lack of spending time with learning MongoDB. It is a non-relational document store. It is NOT a relational database. It requires a different way of storage design and thinking and attempting to force MongoDB to be a SQL-like database is silly. SQL is indeed a popular option and can work well.

However, non-relational databases work well too. There are lots of implementations of it across a lot of companies. A few relatively recent posts are good examples https://engineering.snagajob.com/mongodb-in-aws-does-it-real... and https://mongomikeblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/why-we-went-w... That doesn't account for many of the large companies out there using it, like Expedia, Facebook, Forbes, to name a few.

If we want to have a discussion about specific, current, features of MongoDB, that's great. There are a lot of them. Many have been mentioned. Some have been mentioned as a negative due to what appears to be poor implementation. If we want to debate pros and cons of any product, we should be sure that we are talking about how things are intended to be implemented and not some hacked together approach.

Perhaps the marketing spin was too aggressive. I'm not a marketing person. I'll leave it to Mr. Horowitz to backup his claims. But if we are going to have a discussion about the pros and cons of MongoDB, can we at least agree to not talk about old versions? I mean, I had a bad experience with Windows 3.1, so should I not use Windows anymore? ;-)