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A comment on Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?. Parent comment

Re:Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? by memracom on Thursday July 06, 2017 @02:17PM (#14712568)
Not only that but you can use PostgreSQL as a NoSQL and there are benchmarks showing that it outperforms MongoDB.

And if you do not want to commit to either SQL or NoSQL, the PostgreSQL has you covered. You can put a JSONB column in any of your tables to handle the part of your data that is schemaless, and you can still index the data in that JSONB column.

There are a very few applications that need distributed scalability beyond what Oracle or PostgreSQL can provide, and those ones need NoSQL. They also need highly skilled competent developers who are capable of reimplementing some needed functionality of RDBMSes at scale.

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Re:Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? by klodolph on Thursday July 06, 2017 @02:24PM (#14712631)
These PostgreSQL features are relatively recent. The jsonb column type dates back to 9.4, which was released in Dec 2014, less than three years ago. MongoDB had been around for well over five years by that point.

There are few applications that need distributed scalability beyond what PostgreSQL can provide, but I'd argue that it's not uncommon to have problems with Oracle scalability, if you don't have deep pockets for licensing.

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Re:Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? by takeda on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:34PM (#14719743)
> These PostgreSQL features are relatively recent. The jsonb column type dates back to 9.4, which was released in Dec 2014, less than three years ago. MongoDB had been around for well over five years by that point.

It's much much harder to design a reliable engine than a new datatype.

> There are few applications that need distributed scalability beyond what PostgreSQL can provide, but I'd argue that it's not uncommon to have problems with Oracle scalability, if you don't have deep pockets for licensing.

Yes they are, but chances are you don't have that need. You're not Google or Facebook.

You also picked up a really bad database to talk about scalability[1]

[1] https://www.datastax.com/wp-content/themes/datastax-2014-08/...

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Re:Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? by matthewrudy on Thursday July 06, 2017 @02:38PM (#14712755)
Postgres had hstore for a few years before that which solved similar use cases, but was only key value (no nested objects)
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Re:Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? by s_kilk on Thursday July 06, 2017 @02:51PM (#14712870)
Plus, hstore can only handle strings, so it's actually pretty bad when weighed up against a json-store
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Re:Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? by rhinoceraptor on Thursday July 06, 2017 @02:53PM (#14712885)
Yep, you can't do stuff like update JSON in place until PG 9.5 (without resorting to a crazy regex, that is).

You also do have to think at least a little about your JSON structure given you can't really use an ORM to query JSONB, and the syntax for JSONB is a bit awkward at times.

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