[coldtea]

>The advantages of schemaless documents are priceless. Not having to migrate is just one of the perks.

Was the first sign that this person doesn't know what he is talking about...

Of course you still have to migrate. Either your DB or your code, because you can't handle a change in how you store stuff without one or the other.

"No migrations" is true only for the most trivial of changes, and only if you're willing to handle special cases in your code.

[Pxtl]

I'd wager that the vast majority of schema changes are adding new columns or new tables-as-child-relations, so to be fair those are free in a schemaless DB. So the "trivial" case is actually pretty common.

Honestly, I think the difference between schemaless and SQL corresponds very closely to the differences between static and dynamic-typed languages. The schemaless approach provides faster iterations and the ability to simply express things that require elaborate language features in a static-typed language. The difference is that in a DB, you have to support the data created by all your previous versions, so a DB requires far more discipline than the application code.

I can see the appeal, but I'm not sure that it's worth it.