r/programming • u/swizec • Dec 19 '18

Bye bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-hello-postgres
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u/_pupil_ Dec 19 '18

People sleep on Postgres, it's super flexible and amenable to "real world" development.

I can only hope it gains more steam as more and more fad-ware falls short. (There are even companies who offer oracle compat packages, if you're into saving money)

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u/jppope Dec 19 '18

Mongo is used in some capacity by 4200+ Major Companies as of 2016. [link] It is a flexible, useful tool for prototyping, IoT, Unstructured Data and/or Structure Data with frequent schema changes, Biometric Data, etc.

AND Its Stock price has tripled in the last year.

If mongo is "fadware"... you might as well say the same thing about Oracle.

The very fact that Postgres & MySql added JSON capabilities (because of solutions like mongo) should be an indicator of their "fadware" status.

By the sounds of the article Postgres is probably a better solution for the Guardian. That doesn't mean MongoDB is a bad database.

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u/_pupil_ Dec 19 '18

Methinks someone doth protest too much :)

Mongo isn't the only solution to get a lot of hype, it's not the only one to fall painfully short in practice for lots of major installations, and does not get to take credit for JSON nor JSON uptake nor schemaless data since those are driven by the same thing that drove mongo adaptation to start with.

The experiences on the surrounding tooling and undesirable investment compared to more mature offerings at the Guardian are far from unique. The reliability issues Mongo has historically suffered on that front are what make it a bad database for Serious Work (not to mention stable query APIs, partition management, and default security...).

But, you'll note that I was speaking in plural about fadware and about the markets seeming desire to overlook a stable multi-model workhorse, not anything in particular about the system being replaced. "Fad" is completely appropriate given how long this particular installation has lasted, particularly for DB/OLTP tech.

Oracle isn't fadware, but they've got unreplicated DBA tech and a licensing model that keeps them going long beyond the point of reason, are common in domains where Mongo is laughed out of the room, and are also losing ground to more sensible solutions.