

Why all this hatred to MongoDB? - DonaldDerek

Seriously ? People are blogging about MongoDB accusing it from being a &quot;pretensions&quot; database.
What&#x27;s bothering the most is that these people know a thing or two about computer science, but for instance they ignores something like map reduce in mongoDB...
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cryptolect
I think it's getting to a tipping point where more developers have been burnt
by the overly generous promises of MongoDB then those still believing the
marketing. I think there would be a lot less hate for MongoDB if it hadn't
advertised itself as being more mature than it was. If they'd positioned
themselves as a solution for specific use cases and clearly differentiated
it's suitability compared to relational databases.

That said, I also think a lot of the blame is due to developers with limited
database experience, who believed they could do a 1:1 drop-in replacement of
Mysql/Postgresql with MongoDB. Of course that's not possible, but then MongoDB
didn't seem to do much to argue against the idea.

Bottom-line, MongoDB isn't optimal for the average CRUD application, and I
think there's a growing number of developers who have been burnt trying to use
it that way.

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throwmeaway2525
And yet I see a lot of job ads listing MongoDB.

If I went into an interview and asked why they chose a document-oriented
database, and that one in particular, think I'd be popular? (I like to play
with new techologies, too, but it seems odd to see it mentioned as a
requirement.)

~~~
danudey
Many job ads are written by HR, based on a list of technologies that
developers naively provided them. Some of our job ads have technologies that
we briefly used once in an experiment that was never more than 20% complete,
while MongoDB (which we use in production) isn't currently listed.3

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probably_wrong
In my case, I distinctly remember lots of articles along the lines of "if you
are still using a relational database then you are dumb", and arguments that
gravitated towards "Integrity? Why would you want that, when all data is
trivial either way?" (hyperbole added by me, of course). The "Mongo DB Is Web
Scale" video was funny because, parody aside, it reflected the feeling at the
moment.

Assertions like that (perhaps not officially by the devs, but certainly from
the community) gained MongoDB the reputation of "pretentious" you mention,
IMHO.

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tdubhro1
I'm not participating but I can understand the backlash - over the past few
years I've had plenty of junior developers arguing that we should all be using
mongo for everything, because it's "web scale" and it can handle "big data",
before they even know what a query plan is. A lot of what we do as developers
is, and should be, mentoring new devs, and helping to strike a balance between
prudent adoption of new technology and understanding the utility of mature
technologies, like SQL databases. It has tested the patience of many
competent, pragmatic, experienced developers to have to repeatedly justify the
use of standard SQL dbs on applications for which they are completely
adequate. So the backlash is to be expected.

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wh-uws
Because people find out too late that their data actually is relational and
they go through great pain to migrate it to an rdbms.

With postgres's hstore and new json querying capabilities I see less and less
cases where I would use mongo.

All it ever seems it would have bought you is the ability not to define your
schema up front and not have to do migrations later if you want to add
attributes.

But alot of projects benefit from the early datastore schema design because it
helps you work out the logic in your application.

But now you can add random things to your schema easily in postgres with
hstore or json.

Serious question:

What is Mongo good for up against that?

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DigitalSea
It all comes down to people being severely misinformed and misled by supposed
experts. You are probably referring to the fiasco with the open source
Facebook competitor Diaspora and how they moved from MongoDB to MySQL because
Mongo apparently wasn't up to the task.

It's not the fault of any NoSQL database if someone makes the poor decision to
solely rely on relatively new and untested databases like MongoDB or Couch.
People are using the likes of MongoDB not because they've identified a
technical need, but because it's cool and hip and people want to ride the hype
train with everyone else.

The hatred is more directed at the misuse of embedded documents as opposed to
separate ones and people trying to make MongoDB work exactly like MySQL when
it's completely different. Give it time and you'll see articles from people
proclaiming it's the greatest thing to ever happen to databases and evident by
the funding and money 10Gen have coming in, they must be doing something
right.

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CookWithMe
We are now in the 'Trough of Disillusionment' of the Hype Cycle: 'Interest
wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the
technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving
providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.' [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

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memracom
Too much marketing was delivered and too little technology. Compare to
something like CouchDB or Riak where they really are working hard to deliver
innovative scalable distributed datastores.

Plus the fact that many people gave their heads a shake and realize that you
CAN do a basic key-value noSQL data store in an SQL database with a simple
schema. And of course, both PostgreSQL and MySQL have responded with optimized
key-value store capabilities in their databases right alongside all the SQL
goodness.

