How (and why) Sillicon Alley Insider uses MongoDB

<p><pre><code> it doesn't have any built-in revisioning like CouchDB </code></pre> This is probably one of the most mis-understood features of CouchDB. It's not a revision per-se. It's a feature to support MVCC. It's not meant to show the history of the document over time and it's not guaranteed to be there for all time. If you compact the database the past revisions will be deleted. Referring to the revisions as a feature is somewhat of a misnomer. They are there to enable a feature(MVCC and as a per document consistency check on writes) but aren't really a feature in and of themselves.

Most of the things the article talks about are actually possible in a SQL database. You can easily store JSON data in table rows if you want; foreign keys and joins are just further options that SQL offers you and MongoDB doesn't. I also don't understand the argument for a schema-less database. After all, you always have a schema; in a SQL database it is explicit, whereas in MongoDB it is implicit. Seems similar to the argument between proponents of dynamic and static typing.<p>Overall I think the only reason for going with MongoDB is performance.

I'm using LNMP (pronounced "lamp")<p>Linux nginx mongodb php

<i>"But overall, MongoDB is probably well-suited for a lot of web applications -- maybe as many as 50%."</i><p>Found this at the end of the article, made me chuckle.