A New Perspective on MongoDB

I've found MongoDB to be the perfect datastore for early-stage startups (which are presumably evolving rapidly) for exactly the reasons Mike mentions:<p>- it's super <i>flexible</i> (and schema-less)<p>- dynamic queries are <i>fast</i> and powerful<p>- it's very <i>easy</i> work with<p>Scalability is another issue, <i>but</i> I think Mongo <i>can</i> scale (and that's slowly and bravely being proven by Foursquare). And almost all startups need to drastically re-architect their datastores when they hit massive scale anyways, so why not start out with the easiest and most flexible option that will let you iterate the fastest?

I've looked at mongodb for one particular application and it's currently uneconomic for my particular situation on Amazon EC2.<p>I've got a lot of data but a relatively light workload. One m1.large w/ mysql handles the workload easily, to fit two copies of everything in RAM with mongo I estimate I'd be paying four times as much.<p>Now, if I had more traffic, there's a crossover where mongodb is probably cheaper but the system I've got ought to scale affordably to the point where I'll have enough money for the next thing if I need it.