I’m told they absolutely flooded tech meetups in the SV area and with advertorial talks - talks on NoSQL (that just happened to use MongoDB of course), lots of FUD about SQL vs. NoSQL etc etc.

I’ve no idea to what extent this was true, or if it was whether it was their main marketing approach, but it might have been quite an effective strategy: talks at meetups are often 'trusted' to a greater extent than other ways of reaching devs & if you can find a new generation of devs who are just starting out and hook them on your product before they get the chance to explore other approaches then it could work. High cost of course (someone has to pay for all that time) but if it gets you a leg up on your competitors in a $billion business then that’s what the VC money is for...

MongoDB was huge at hackathons, too. People could implement an app in a weekend using MongoDB because it had no integrity checks and none of its drawbacks manifest themselves in the first two days of development.

I totally get this, but a hackathon is a one time software build and you don't need to lean heavily on a schema if you've only got one state your data has ever existed in, MongoDB is great for templating like this.

However, when it comes to writing software that's meant to survive changes and versions the schema ends up providing a safety net that ensures you can ignore the data that exists and assume that the structure described by your schema is consistent. Data integrity is key to maintainability and those constraints are what keep your data clean.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that they seeded the hackathons with ringers too: Devs on payroll that turned up & implemented a website/app in a weekend that naturally 'just happened' to use MongoDB.

Makes you wonder what other meetup/hackathon visible tech is really covert marketing...