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Comment by henning | Hacker News Reader

Using MongoDB was a mistake to begin with even if he didn't select the wrong branch to use. His project isn't about databases, it's about machine learning. For his requirements, he just needs a simple datastore and it sounds like SQLite would have worked fine.

He procrastinated by trying out cool new software (a classic symptom of a project that is not going properly) and lost a lot of time because of the mistaken manner in which he did it.

He should get back on track by focusing on the real meat of his project and use the simplest bitbucket he can find for it.

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If you are doing document processing, a document database is actually the right choice.

I disagree with your comment. I do machine learning and NLP, and I prefer mongodb as a data-store to RDBMs. SQLite would be overkill. MongoDB is a more convenient and simple choice than an RDBM.

Using a schema-less document database is natural in NLP, where you might add columns to your fields on the fly, e.g. you are experimenting with a new preprocessing step and want to cache the result.

I'm curious what you mean by "overkill." SQLite has really low startup costs and is easy to use from almost any language. The code you have to use to query it is not verbose. Typically when I see the word "overkill," I expect that there is some downside for using an approach that is too powerful. But I can't think of a downside to using SQLite in this context.

SQLite requires schema definition (CREATE TABLE, ALTER, etc). Thats a bit overkill sometimes when you just want to store a JSON object. Mongo makes it much easier to just start pushing data into collections without having to worry about the tables and columns being defined.

No project is "about databases" [1]: they about something else, and databases are a tool use to achieve that end.

Besides, whether he was procrastinating or not is irrelevant to his complaint.

[1] ok, some are.

Yes, the fact that MongoDB was losing his data was all his fault because he chose MongoDB. Sound logic.

That's not what I said.

Well, the problem was the unstable branch. The general case larger problem was that he wasn't paying attention to what the hell he was doing.

Oh yeah, hi BJ :)

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