Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by svisser | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

svisser

Not even a hackathon?

View on HN

MongoDB has THE WORST vendor lock-in imaginable, so only use it if you know that you could throw everything away.

Source: my last employer used MongoDB, and switching to an RDBMS would have forced us to rewrite ~80% of the codebase.

About 80% rewrite: it is poor abstraction problem rather then vendor lock-in one

Yeah, that contributed, but it wasn't any worse than most other CRUD apps I've seen.

Abstracting over your database only makes sense if you're writing something that's lowest common denominator. If your application runs equally well on MongoDB and something else you either are running poorly on both or you are spending a lot of resources on writing your abstraction layer.

"you know that you could throw everything away" To be fair, that's like 99% of all hackathons I've been to

If your data really doesnt matter you might as well just use ElasticSearch as a document store, its a lot easier anyways

I doubt ElasticSearch is easier to set up and get started with than MongoDB, especially if you're coming from limited knowledge about either.

Use Redis, then.

Why?

Actually Redis is as safe as PostgreSQL. Read the documentation please :)

ElasticSearch is trivial to set up, especially if we're talking about a small project like a hackathon.

It's not without its problems but ES's first-fifteen-minutes story is pretty good.

ElasticSearch takes less than 5 minutes to set up, and you literally just perform HTTP requests against it. In my opinion it is much easier than setting up MongoDB.

ES is wicked easy to setup and use, but it's not recommended as the primary data store for split-brain scenarios, IIRC.

OP was talking about hackathons.

I've built real-world products with both ES and Mongo as primary datastores. ES is a hundred times more complicated, with a really awkward query syntax and a lot of unintuitive behavior. And, from the Call Me Maybe series, ES is no more reliable than MongoDB in a cluster.

ES is amazing for what it does, but its use cases don't overlap heavily with Mongo (or RDBMSes).

They've sponsored tons of hackathons, so it's super popular there. But to me, a big part of hackathons is learning something new, and MongoDB is apparently just not worth learning.

This points at a bigger issue, to be honest: it seems MongoDB is popular purely because of marketing and intentional hype.

Evidence for those claims that MongoDB is "fast" never materialized, nobody really knew where the claim came from, yet it was constantly repeated. They sponsor a lot of hackathons, and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com