wilco_vd

I was one of the developers on the team that wrote that article. The main point of the article was (and still is) not that PostgreSQL is better than MongoDB, but that PostgreSQL suited us better at that point. In hindsight I think it suited us better because MongoDB was relatively new tech, PostgreSQL was more mature. Especially if it came to tooling and diagnosis on -what- is going wrong when things go wrong, as well as searchable help on the internet.

The extra maturity of PostgreSQL allowed us to learn faster and evolve our software faster with less surprises. As a small team in a start-up this was essential to us.

Considering other articles on that "picked a solution and didn't understand it well" - I do thing they are very valuable.

They provide an insight on how well frameworks and technology support a learning curve. It's not about having only Pro's. it's about how easy it is to get yourself unstuck if you engineered yourself in a corner where you don't want to be.

Hey, I was one of the developers on the team at that time. It's been fun re-reading that write up. I learned a lot since then, and I think the whole industry has learned a lot regarding NoSQL databases, their strengths and weaknesses and how to deal with those in your applications.

You are correct that the biggest issue was that we couldn't diagnose problems when they occurred, and therefore we couldn't learn. Some of those problems were for sure "user error", others were absolutely problems with MongoDB at the time. It was a "young" database back in 2015.