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Comment by bit_flipper | Hacker News Reader

This article seems to have inspired others to look at MongoDB again, so I'll give my thoughts after using it recently.

MongoDB Atlas is a surprisingly good managed database product. I'm not a huge fan of someone else running my databases, but I think it might be the best one you can run across any cloud. If you like MongoDB (and, ignore the memes, there is a lot to like nowadays), and are OK paying a bit more to have someone run your database, I'd strongly consider Atlas.

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The problem is when you grow. They can be really tough to work with on pricing. Also, their licensing does not allow servers past a certain size. Can you imagine Oracle telling the CIA they can't use servers with more than 256gb of ram? Just silly.

I'm not sure what experience you have, but I've run both their Enterprise licensed database on prem as well as migrated to Atlas and there have never been any licensing issues preventing vertical scaling of databases. One of our clusters on Atlas right now has machines larger than 256GB of RAM -- you're more limited by what your cloud vendor has available than Atlas.

Actually yeah for Atlas, I guess they automatically bill you as if it was 2-3x Enterprise Advanced licenses so there's no discussion. I thought it was the same as Enterprise Advanced but I guess not. With EA each unit above 256gb is billed as an additional license. See [0] [1] [2].

[0] https://www.mongodb.com/community/forums/t/for-mongodb-enter...

[1] https://www.mongodb.com/community/forums/t/for-mongodb-enter...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mongodb-sizing-guide-sepp-ren...

Oracle charges per 2 vCPU. This is quite standard.

In our case in the support call they just told us it wasn't allowed. Now I'm realizing they were wrong.

Yeah atlas with federated queries and what not makes thinking about the entirety of an application storage layer a breeze. And gpt is even better at generating mongo queries than it is at sql, which is a nice unexpected facilitation in day to day usage.

No support for collation is an enormous dealbreaker. It means you can't have case-insensitive searches or keys (e.g. foo@bar.com is treated differently than Foo@bar.com). You also can't rename databases.

The query syntax is also a massive pain IMHO. Especially when you get into nesting expressions. E.g. I can never remember if it's `{$id: $regex{'/pattern/'}}` or `{$id: ${regex: '/pattern/'}}` or `{$id: $regex{ pattern: '/pattern/' }}` or something totally different.

SQL is still superior.

>It means you can't have case-insensitive searches or keys (e.g. foo@bar.com is treated differently than Foo@bar.com). You also can't rename databases.

Can't you just query for a lowercase version of the input and sanitize data going into the DB so it's only lowercase? I'm not a mongo user but that doesn't seem like a dealbreaker to me

Yes, you'd do something just like that. Document databases aren't relational databases. People need to think about solving the same problems a little differently. A lot of folks used to relational databases push for some perfect third normal form like disk space is still the major constraint in massive databases. For document databases, you design them based on how they are going to be used. Even if that means duplication of data like storing the lowercase version of something for indexing or rolling up your data into summary collections instead of performing those sorts of queries or collection aggregations on-demand.

Relational DBs often involve duplication for these kinds of use cases. Simple case-insensitive match can be handled with a custom index that's automatically derived from the col data, but there are more advanced cases where you need manually denormalized tables. Or sometimes it makes sense for performance reasons, but you only do this after you notice the normalized way being too slow.

Sure. It's not like all folks who lean on relational databases are third normal form zealots. But third normal form zealots exclusively come from a relational database background. Which makes sense.

They probably do, but idk, I've never considered 3NF or the preferred type of DBMS as part of someone's personal identity. These are just tools.

I’ve been using DynamoDB for the first time recently and this is some good perspective to bring to it!

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