[amalag]

If your data is easily modeled relationally, go for relation, if you are going to change it constantly and is not a natural fit for a relational model, Mongodb is worth a shot.

From this article, sounds like their data is pretty seriously relational.

Mongodb has been pushing the ops side of their product, but I can agree it has failings there. To me the advantage is the querying and the json style documents.

[gmcquillan]

I'm not sure you read the article fully, because relationships were never described in the article. Instead, it was high read/update load which caused problems.

Mongo, on paper, should be an ideal candidate for this job; but, due to complications with the locking model and with its inability to do online compactions, it's failing.

[amalag]

Relation was a bad word choice, I meant easily modeled by a relational database system. Seems like your data can be modeled with fixed columns.

I had to model data with umpteen crazy relationships so we went with Mongodb. We did not have the high update issue or any locking issues. If one has a few large tables with fixed columns that can easily define the data, then relational DBs probably make more sense. But to your point, 10gen will not tell you that and the hype doesn't tell you that either.