I went to production with Mongo and it exceeded my expectations. It operated without a single issue for years under high load. It was a dream to administer and a vital piece of a multimillion dollar franchise.

Everybody else I know, however, has had nothing but headaches.

They’re the same reasons I’ve seen people fail at using Cassandra, Redis, or Spanner. If you can’t adjust to the limitations and paradigm shift, you get no benefits. And an ORM often makes everything worse.

The “no” in NoSQL doesn’t seem to stop people from modeling join relationships in Redis, or chaining distributed queries with fully consistent writes on Cassandra.

I’m on a project right now, where a developer has selected an ORM for PostgreSQL that forgoes joins. They’ve managed to generate about 100 queries, in one case, where a single query is all that’s needed. 2ms vs. 800+ms. That individual is incapable of using something more complicated. Substituting Mongo as-is will make everything worse, and they’ll triumphantly proclaim how terrible NoSQL is and then write an article.

I feel confident using Mongo for any task. I don’t feel confident letting most of my peers use it.

There are a LOT of legitimate gripes, but no article I’ve read mentions them. It’s always the same superficial complaints from ten years ago. If you can’t get past those, choose another tool. End. Of. Story.