Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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Are any of you guys old enough to remember when Marc Fleury got caught in an astroturfing scheme involving JBoss employees? That’s actually how I learned that word had been coined.

The MongoDB Team didn’t do exactly the same, or at least nobody caught them, but they did have a massive hype cycle, selling snake oil full of serious concurrency bugs. Managed to time their funding right so they ended up with enough money to buy a completely different NoSQL implementation, that actually did work (mostly), discontinued work on their code and relabeled the other implementation as Mongo.

I don’t patronize companies built on a bed of lies. Because how do you trust the lies stopped? They have a proven track record of being good at it. And you’re rewarding all of that behavior. The ends justify the means? Fuck that.

I suspect a good amount of the hype around NoSQL was driven by frontend developers transitioning into backend work via Node, and Mongo being relatively simple to get started on compared to relational databases. And that culture seems to have stuck. To this day, many popular backend js frameworks either completely ignore relational data storage or slap some bare bones interface over it.

I believe that this is also why we're starting to see a surge in people wanting to run SQLite as their backend database. It's similarly simple to start out with, and also similarly flimsy when dealing with actual data integrity. Very limited types, limited isolation options, ref integrity disabled by default (Mongo DB also disables things by default that hurts their benchmarks).

But hey, SQLite is better than Mongo DB, at least. So we're making progress

There might be some truth in that. I've come to respect SQLite more as a serious database though. It can perform well if you can manage the trade-offs of running on a single server and turn the right knobs. The upgrade path to Postgres is also a lot clearer than with Mongo.

Good point! SQLite is simple and great for small projects, but its limits with data integrity and concurrency show at scale. Still, it's a more predictable choice than MongoDB, which has its own quirks. Definitely progress!

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