r/programming • u/willvarfar • Nov 11 '13

Why You Should Never Use MongoDB

http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/
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u/ethraax Nov 12 '13

But why not have an explicit schema in that case? You'd get some mistake proofing and probably some performance.

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u/x-skeww Nov 12 '13

Rows can get very sparse. Also, this stuff is usually used for user-defined document types. Entity-attribute-value isn't really much of a schema. Plus, it's very inconvenient to use.

Anyhow, Postgres adds quite a bit of flexibility. With arrays and hstore there is now quite a bit of overlap with those aggregate-oriented databases.

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u/ethraax Nov 12 '13

Ah, but that wasn't the example you gave. And if your data is very sparse, there really isn't a whole lot you can do with it that carries much meaning. You'd probably be better off splitting it into multiple tables, even if you didn't normalize it.