Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I’m on record here saying I really dislike Mongo DB and never want to work with it again. I stand by that. But Atlas is a really nice product (to work around the inherent failings of Mongo, but hey, you’re locked in already). Want to look at something in a backup? Select your snapshot, download and run a special binary, and point your client at it. It takes like 30 seconds to be pulling data from any backup. I did it this week. Now, would I have been able to make the mess I needed to recover from if I’d been using Postgres? No, of course not. But like I said: you’re locked-in already.

Edit: Mongo is a special kind of lock-in: your code ends up so much more tightly-coupled, and hard to extricate, because of the Mongo pattern of making you do the work to ensure consistency and correctness. I can’t imagine it was planned, but it’s highly effective: for many companies it’s just too much work, too expensive, and the benefits are too opaque (“but the application works now, and you’re telling me you want to switch databases and it’ll take how long?!”) for others to buy into.

I’d call it clever, but I think it’s a profitable accident that’s a braking force on the progress of many teams.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: