> Being ignorant of SQL and attracted by the "flexibility" of schema-less data stores powered by javascript is definitely the wrong reason to look at Mongo.
It's usually the only reason. And 10gen were good at marketing it.
It's usually the only reason. And 10gen were good at marketing it.
Initially trying to come up with a schema in SQL was somewhat painful as what I was really looking for was an object store. Switching to mongo gave me a way to do a very clean, simple solution that worked quite well for the problem at hand (representing pdf forms). That said, we also played it very safe and used mongo for only the document portion, with every other part of the system being in an sql database. But for the doucuments mongo worked really well as a basic object store without the complexity of something like Neo4j.
MongoDB was 5-10x faster than PostgreSQL, Cassandra etc.
If your domain model is structured like a document then MongoDB is a pretty great fit.
If you don't need indexing into the document, you can easily just store it as serialized bytea data. I've done this quite frequently and it works wonderfully.
And that is a big deal for a lot of developers.
SELECT json_data FROM people WHERE json_data->'age' > 15
vs
db.people.find( { age: { $gt: 10 } } )
Personally, I prefer the postgres syntax. It's much clearer. I also don't buy your claims below about performance. Can you provide a real benchmark? Are you running with the safeties off meaning you lose data?
select ... where person -> favFood in ("pizza")
I'll admit that I originally got into it because I didn't really know SQL and I'm still not very talented with it but for example.. Joins in Mongoose? Say there is a comment.. this comment has an author. If that author is type ObjectId when I run a query I can do this:
model.comment.find({_id: <some id>}).populate('author').exec(e, result) { // author will be populated with that author's data instead of just the ID }