There’s been a lot of talk about the Jepsen-Mongo affair on HN lately, but the problem I have with Mongo and NoSQL in general is much more basic - it’s modeling relationships, which always end up appearing in every data model I’ve ever designed.
I’m aware you can keep references from one doc to another but it always ends up being a messy affair even at smallish scales, and it feels as if the cognitive burden of managing these relationships ends up falling on the dev, instead of being managed by the DB.
For those of you using MongoDB in large scale large production apps, is this not a problem? Is your underlying business domain really non-relational, or do you manage to comfortably run highly relational models on a doc-based DB? How?
Mongodb now supports effectivly "Joins" in its aggregation framework, so it can do some relational style data representation. The latest versions also support transactions.
Yeah but they do not recommend using that. I think the one nosql afficianado in my team spoke with mongo support and they recommended reassessing our document structure for it. (So a migration after all... )
Also in their blogpost [1], about $lookup they say:
We’re still concerned that $lookup can be misused to treat MongoDB like a relational database. But instead of limiting its availability, we’re going to help developers know when its use is appropriate, and when it’s an anti-pattern. In the coming months, we will go beyond the existing documentation to provide clear, strong guidance in this area.
I’m aware you can keep references from one doc to another but it always ends up being a messy affair even at smallish scales, and it feels as if the cognitive burden of managing these relationships ends up falling on the dev, instead of being managed by the DB.
For those of you using MongoDB in large scale large production apps, is this not a problem? Is your underlying business domain really non-relational, or do you manage to comfortably run highly relational models on a doc-based DB? How?