zlacker

> MongoDB gained traction not because it's an alternative to MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Honestly I think it only gained traction because many Node devs refused to learn SQL and the document model is familiar because it's closer to JSON data.

These days Mongo is good but that wasn't the case back 10+ years ago.

replies(1): >>inferi+Vw

>>pier25+(OP)
Mongo was so comically bad. I remember trying to sort through a slow query and thought: ah ha! I'll just add an index. Unfortunately on that version of Mongo, creating an index would occasionally just crash the server process.

I think Mongo became popular because it's ad tech and those guys knew how to be buzzword compliant. JSON-esque documents are one thing, but Mongo is Javascript to the core. All of a sudden your JS devs don't have to learn SQL they can just shit out some queries in javascript. Of course that came with some pretty severe drawbacks.

replies(2): >>The_Co+zQ >>orthox+DQ

>>inferi+Vw
As I remember, MongoDB got popular before node.js, so there wasn't really a lot of backend JavaScript developers out there to make a difference.

We first used Mongo ~11 years ago with Java. For us the benefit was that we could dump unstructured data into it quickly, but still run queries / aggregations on it later.

>>inferi+Vw
My favourite story about MongoDB is that it was so bad and popular at the same time that when a competitor developed a wire-compatible database that was miles better they simply bought it and released it as the next version of MongoDB.