On migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to MongoDB

Just reading this article http://www.wireclub.com/development/TqnkQwQ8CxUYTVT90/read describing one companies experiences migrating from SQL Server to MongoDB.

Having read the article, my only question to these folks is “why do it”?

Let’s begin by saying that we should discount all one time costs related to data migration. They are just that, one time migration costs. However monumental, if you believe that the final outcome is going to justify it, grin and bear the cost.

But, once you are in the (promised) MongoDB land, what then?

The things that this author believes that they will miss are:

maturity
tools
query expressiveness
transactions
joins
case insensitive indexes on text fields

Really, and you would still roll the dice in favor of a NoSQL science project. Well, then the benefits must be really really awesome! Let’s go take a look at what those are. Let’s take a look at what those are:

MongoDB is free
MongoDB is fast
Freedom from rigid schemas
ObjectID’s are expressive and handy
GridFS for distributed file storage
Developed in the open

OK, I’m scratching my head now. None of these really blows me away. Let’s look at these one at a time.

MongoDB is free

So is PostgreSQL and MySQL

MongoDB is fast

So are PostgreSQL and MySQL if you put them on the same SSD and multiple HDD’s like you claim you do with MongoDB

Freedom from rigid schemas

I’ll give you this one, relational databases are kind of “old school” in this department

ObjectID’s are expressive and handy

Elastic Transparent Sharding schemes like ParElastic overcome this with Elastic Sequences which give you the same benefits. A half-way decent developer could do this for you with a simple sharded architecture.

GridFS for distributed file storage

Replication anyone?

Developed in the open

Yes, MongoDB is free and developed in the open like a puppy is “free”. You just told us all the “costs” associated with this “free puppy”

So really, why do people use MongoDB? I know there are good circumstances where MongoDB will whip the pants off any relational database but I submit to you that those are the 1%.

To this day, I believe that the best description of MongoDB is this one:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/mongo-db-is-web-scale

Mongo DB is web scale
by: gar1t

http://www.xtranormal.com/xtraplayr/6995033/mongo-db-is-web-scale