Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adoxyz 2127 days ago
Have you evaluated MongoDB to see why it's desirable?

Ignorance of a technology is a poor excuse to crap on it. I've used many different technologies over my 15 year career. SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Firebase, etc. Each worked well enough, each had it's drawbacks. I'm not here to tell you MongoDB is a silver bullet for every specific use case, but from personal experience I haven't run into an instance where it was a hindrance.

Disclaimer: I currently work for MongoDB.

2 comments

My big issue with MongoDB is similar to this Potts quote

“I have no problem with god - it's his fan club that scares me.”

MongoDB works fine in niche situations of trying to store large blobs of JSON with extremely different elements. But for the vast majority of cases, data is highly relational. So Mongo is just a crutch that companies like because of the lower skill ceiling. Most of these startups can't be bothered to pay high enough to recruit people who payed attention during their databases lecture. In the long run, it just creates a jumbled mess of db code.

Every project I've worked in, got rid of mongo once they grew to any reasonable size due to cost and maintenance overhead. It's not a hindrance for small projects, but becomes a pain at scale in my experience. Based on that I'd never use it again for anything I plan to scale, gutting it out later is a pain. Might as well build it right the first time.