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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

It that point it's harder for me to understand why I'm not just writing out JSON files or something.

You definitely can but MongoDB provides convenience over storing and managing JSON files on you filesystem by your own efforts.

Sure, but it is also another service to keep running. Depends on what scale you're operating at.

Any RDBMS is just a toolset to manage files on some filesystem. If you are dealing with some config files you can spare yourself the trouble and just load them from the filesystem.

NoSQL or classic RDBMS, these tools give you ways to manage your data on the filesystem(or in the memory?). You can spend time to write a code that processes files in a folder or you can use the software that does it for you. You can write a code that relates two files in a folder or you can use a software that already can do it and you can just ask that software for the outcome.

I don't really have to write that code though; what language doesn't already have file-manipulation libraries?

Well I guess some people wonder why people are using ready software when you can achieve the exact same thing with a text editor and a compiler.

That's not the same thing at all; you're suggesting an approach that probably takes more code and definitely takes more setup.

You are underestimating the complexities of file management

Again, depends on scope and scale. If you have a handful of items to process it's not a big deal.

No, I really can't think of any situation where installing, managing, updating, maintaining, and crying over a mongodb cluster would be easier for a flat-file datastore than say, a file system, or S3. In fact if one is on AWS, then nothing beats just dumping them in S3 and processing them as necessary. If I'm a startup and I really wanted some querying then PostgreSQL looks great, with Amazon handling the maint and backups.

You can even query flatfiles in s3 using SQL via AWS Athena.

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