A NoSQL Conversation

This cropped up recently. It's part of a "replace Mongo with Relational DB" conversation.

I'm going to elide the conversation down to five key points. The three posthoc nonsensical ideas, and the two real points.

What's (to me) very telling is that someone else published the five reasons in this order. As if they larded three on the front. Or, included the two at the end out of guilt because they were avoiding the real issues.

Relational Queries Are Desired

"The only way to find [the documents] would be to write a query that literally trolls through the entire database in order to find the most recent values." 

I beg to differ. "Only way" is a strong statement. Mongo has indexes. To suggest that they exist or don't work is misleading. The details of the use case involved searching by date. It's possible to contrive a database that does bad searches by date; the implication being that Mongo couldn't do date matching or something. 

To Enforce Constraints and Schema 

"It is still possible for the application layer to ensure the constraint, but that relies on every single point in the application code enforcing it–a single error can lead to inconsistent data". 

This runs perilously close to the "What if some bonehead bypasses the API and hacks into the database directly?" question. Which is isomorphic to "What if all corporate governance disappeared tomorrow?" and "What if an evil genius hacks all our database drivers?"

Lack of Document-Oriented Access Patterns.  

"If there are more complex access patterns (like reading certain fields from many records, or frequently updating single fields within a record) then a document-oriented database is not a good fit"

That's nonsense. Mongo has field-level updates. There was one example of a long-running transaction that appeared to be misdesigned. I suggested that an improved design might be less complex and expensive than rewriting the API's and moving the data.

What's Left  

• Desire to Utilize [Relational DB]

• More Support Available for [Relational DB]

Clearly, these last two are the real reasons. Everything above looks like posthoc justification for the real issue. 

We're not sure we like Mongo. 

My point in the conversation was not to talk them out of making a switch. The last two reasons included the kind of compelling rationalization that can't be disputed. The best I could do was to challenge the errors in the first three reasons so that everyone could be honest about the change. It's not technical. It's organizational.