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0 pointsvacri9y ago0 comments

At my last workplace, I finally asked: "Since you guys bitch about mongo so much, why do we use it? Why not something else?". Response: "It's not actually that bad, it does the job".

Half the crap people speak about Mongo seems to be from either the early days, or from people who just like to complain. It certainly has it's issues, but there doesn't seem to be much community will to replace it with $superdupernosqldb.

0 comments

tinco9y ago

Despite some of it's crappiness MongoDB actually has a bunch of features that other databases (such as PG) don't such as easy to set up sharding and replication.

We run Mongo side by side with PG, and even though the PG is just replicated and not also sharded like our Mongo cluster is, Mongo was more easy to configure.

I think MongoDB's biggest problem is that it was marketed as the general purpose DB in the Node.js community when actually it is a specialised tool. So now you have thousands of developers wondering why they're on this weirdly behaving document store when they could've scaled fine on something more generic like PG.

More on topic: RethinkDB was aiming to be the best of both worlds, generic like PG yet document oriented and horizontal scaling like Mongo. I think their problem is that they didn't manage to pierce the communities. It would have gone better if they had evangelists for every major platform that just produced a stream of blog posts, small open source projects and tools and crashed random meet ups.

erikpukinskis9y ago

I think Mongo lives in the "we probably shouldn't have chosen this, but it feels scarier to try to tear it out than to make do" place.

omginternets9y ago

Also not the point.

vacriOP9y ago

I thought I was supporting your argument about network effects and will to change.

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