ORMs are not really required in a Node/Mongo/JSON setup anymore:
- JSON's nature is already very 'object oriented' and I use in code JSON data like it saved—no translation beetween clunky SQL and objects is necessary (if I have a DB which saves JSON natively like Mongo)
- Mongo allows to directly save JSON and stuff like migrations is stuff from the past since tables/collections don't have to be created
- Mongo's Native Driver is low level and at the same time fully sufficient, the syntax is not beautiful and tons of libs sit on top to make it beautiful but I still don't see the need for a real ORM
So, Mongo's Native Driver is your best friend and validations are often a matter of a few lines. Or did I miss anything which is life saving I get from ORMs in a Node/Mongo setup?
Good point and I just checked: rdb seems to be for SQL based DBs.
But I am wondering who is using SQL based DBs with Node, feels ancient to me, except you build the next datastore for a bank but even then. Also Postgres with its JSON options does not give the feeling, flexibility and speed as Node/Mongo.
I could imagine that the larger part of Node users are working with Mongo, or not?
Mongo is great for when you're rapidly developing a product and/or still operating at a small-medium scale.
Once you start to really scale, you'll start to find a couple parts of MongoDB break-down:
1. MongoDB has no concept of transactions and is not ACID compliant. These short-comings seem innocuous enough at first, but you end up with some crazy potential race conditions that you just end up praying you never face.
2. Distributed MongoDB layers are difficult to implement as well as maintain.
3. MongoDB Replica sets are unpredictable and unreliable in the speed at which they are able to stay up to date and require changes to your code to fully utilize (since you need to ensure you are always reading from a replica when you can, but only ever writing to the master MongoDB instance)
4. At scale, MongoDB will consistently perform worse than Postgres for CRUD-based operations
5. Do you have true relations between documents? Do you ever use Mongoose's convenient `populate()` functionality? If so, you are now making multiple db queries in series when trying to fetch a document(s) from a single collection. This starts to really hurt your query times once you get enough documents/relations in your mongo collections.
I'm sure I'm missing some, but these are some of the areas where MongoDB has fallen down for me in the past.
> Mongo is great for when you're rapidly developing a product and/or still operating at a small-medium scale.
Yesterday somebody from a node-based consultancy gave a talk at work about microservices, where he remarked in passing that they tend to start projects with mongo, then wait for a schema to kind of 'fall out' of the application as it takes shape, and then switch to postgres or something. Which doesn't seem like an awful idea.
Maybe if you are working with data which inherently has a relational structure using a relational database makes sense. Maybe if you need to ensure transactional consistency, you want to use a data-store which is ACID compliant.
You know: There's no silver hammer. Use the right tool for the right job. Etc etc.
Just a though. A sprinkle of old man's dust onto this new hip generation who thinks JSON solves all the problems in the world.
Rdb (Relational Database) is meant only for Relation Databases (sql). I have no plans on supporting document databases - that would probably a bad compromize. And the api would be affected in a negative way.
- JSON's nature is already very 'object oriented' and I use in code JSON data like it saved—no translation beetween clunky SQL and objects is necessary (if I have a DB which saves JSON natively like Mongo)
- Mongo allows to directly save JSON and stuff like migrations is stuff from the past since tables/collections don't have to be created
- Mongo's Native Driver is low level and at the same time fully sufficient, the syntax is not beautiful and tons of libs sit on top to make it beautiful but I still don't see the need for a real ORM
So, Mongo's Native Driver is your best friend and validations are often a matter of a few lines. Or did I miss anything which is life saving I get from ORMs in a Node/Mongo setup?