Re:How to make MongoDB not suck for analytics
by stickfigure on Monday July 02, 2018 @03:04PM
(#17444493)
I was wondering if I would get a comment like this.
With two engineers starting from scratch, we launched a product in three months that was making millions (per month, in profit) by six. When I hear "done a prototype and evaluated the product", I think you operate on a very different kind of timeframe. We needed a customer-facing analytics solution ASAP for the sales that our customers were already making.
This is why Postgres would have been the right choice from the start (mea culpa). It may not be the best solution, but it will be an adequate solution and get you through enough scale that you can worry about the million other holes to backfill. I thought I was being clever with BigQuery; it looked great on paper. Keen has better marketing but really the same problems. Mongo at least I was familiar with going into it, and that solution worked for a couple months, right up until the queries got complicated. Which in retrospect they were always going to.
In a runaway startup you're not going to be an expert in everything, or have time to plan out an optimal solution. Pick technologies that you can be confident will be "good enough for now" and give you time to find the boundaries of your particular problem domain. Postgres is a good axe to start with.
With two engineers starting from scratch, we launched a product in three months that was making millions (per month, in profit) by six. When I hear "done a prototype and evaluated the product", I think you operate on a very different kind of timeframe. We needed a customer-facing analytics solution ASAP for the sales that our customers were already making.
This is why Postgres would have been the right choice from the start (mea culpa). It may not be the best solution, but it will be an adequate solution and get you through enough scale that you can worry about the million other holes to backfill. I thought I was being clever with BigQuery; it looked great on paper. Keen has better marketing but really the same problems. Mongo at least I was familiar with going into it, and that solution worked for a couple months, right up until the queries got complicated. Which in retrospect they were always going to.
In a runaway startup you're not going to be an expert in everything, or have time to plan out an optimal solution. Pick technologies that you can be confident will be "good enough for now" and give you time to find the boundaries of your particular problem domain. Postgres is a good axe to start with.