Why You Should Never Use MongoDB

> Seven-table joins. Ugh. What? That's what relationship databases are for. And seven is nothing. Properly indexed, that's probably super-super-fast. This is the equivalent of a C programmer saying "dereferencing a pointer, ugh". Or a PHP programmer saying "associative arrays, ugh". I think this attitude comes from a similar place as JavaScript-hate. A lot of people have to write JavaScript, but aren't good at JavaScript, so they don't take time to learn the language, and then when it doesn't do…

My first introduction to databases was with PHP/MySQL, where normalization was the name of the game. The whole point of normalization is that there is no duplication of data anywhere. If it's possible for duplicate data to exist, that's a symptom of a design flaw in the schema. I've been using Mongo recently, and every time I raise criticism of it, the counterargument I hear is "forget about normalization! Duplication is okay." Like the author, I really cannot wrap my…

This article keeps coming up every once in a while and reminds me of all those “Why JS sucks”, “Never use PHP”, “Java is enterprise only”, “Ruby only works on hobby projects” etc... But then in real life people built great software with all the above, so I’ll just say a great classic: pick something you know, use it well, build something good, end of story! No tool will fix wrong assumptions or bad design, we can dive into philosophy…

This is old, but a really interesting read. Not so much because of the discussion of Mongo; more that it shows what happens when you unthinkingly follow tech trends, without thinking carefully about your own requirements.