MongoDB still has an awful reputation on Hacker News but I really appreciate the take from "Why RethinkDB Failed" [0]:<p>> People wanted RethinkDB to be fast on workloads they actually tried, rather than “real world” workloads we suggested. For example, they’d write quick scripts to measure how long it takes to insert ten thousand documents without ever reading them back. MongoDB mastered these workloads brilliantly, while we fought the losing battle of educating the market.<p>> almost everyone was asking “how is RethinkDB different from MongoDB?” We worked hard to explain why correctness, simplicity, and consistency are important, but ultimately these weren’t the metrics of goodness that mattered to most users.<p>> But over time I learned to appreciate the wisdom of the crowds. MongoDB turned regular developers into heroes when people needed it, not years after the fact. It made data storage fast, and let people ship products quickly. And over time, MongoDB grew up. One by one, they fixed the issues with the architecture, and now it is an excellent product. It may not be as beautiful as we would have wanted, but it does the job, and it does it well.<p>In my mind Mongo is a database that had great developer experience, excellent marketing, and some seriously bad technical gotchas. But marketing drove momentum long enough to cover bills, grab the market, and address most of the gotchas, so now it's a decent DB.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.htm...</a>
The "Mongo DB is Web Scale" video just turned 10 years old. I'm pretty sure that was a big factor in MongoDB not being taken seriously by many people.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs</a>
Mongo is much maligned here and I hesitate to even comment for fear of attack, but in my mind it has some compelling use cases and after Wired Tiger became the default storage engine, that pretty much solved the issues with compaction I had seen in the past while delivering a lot more performance.<p>I've built systems with it where we didn't own the schema - we were scraping data from other places and schemaless was a feature. And I benchmarked it against Postgres and a couple other things and I just couldn't get the same performance - note our operations were idempotent to the db, so even in a hard crash, we could just re-run the scraping job and we wouldn't really "lose" any data -- or even if the data was stale by a day, not a big deal... That system would do tens of millions of upserts per night on not crazy AWS hardware and it ran for years like this without problems.<p>Would I use mongo for situations where I needed transactions? Almost never - I actually like Postgres a lot and it's my default for your run of the mill CRUD apps since you can do geo, crypto, search, etc by just installing a few extensions. Do I got on HN on every mongo article and bash them constantly? No, I think they've built a pretty decent thing if you understand the implications of not confirming writes to replicas and whatnot and tune it to your needs.
Lots of interesting info, and I really like working with MongoDB. But I am baffled by the claim that "MongoDB is the king." In all the circles I work in, I only hear Mongo dismissed as a joke. Unfortunately the company's dismissiveness of RDBMSes, their hubris in pushing NoSQL, and their blunders over what are extremely poor default settings all combine to make MongoDB something I don't see anyone taking seriously. I use it in a project where it's basically just serving as a big cache, so the reliability and durability of the data is not critical. It's certainly way easier to query than any other document-oriented database, but getting a foothold to use for anything requiring long-term storage would be a major challenge.