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Comment by uptownJimmy | Hacker News Reader

I am not a hater, quite the contrary. I've messed around with Meteor just a bit, and loved it. But I cannot get my head around one thing: why in the world would anyone actually choose to use MongoDB over Postgres or MySQL ?Is there actually a use case where a NoSQL db would be as good or preferable? Or is it really all just a matter of people being intimidated by SQL? Because everything informed and trustworthy that I read on the subject says that NoSQL is simply not robust enough for doing anything more complicated than storing a list of names and email addresses for a simple user forum. That ain't gonna cut it for most apps.

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My web development experience started with Rails, Postgres, and SQLite about 16 months ago and starting using Meteor about 10 months ago. In the handful of Rails apps I made, all of my interactions with the database were done through Active Record; I was an abstraction away from any SQL queries. I declared my relationships and got the data I wanted with simple `object.attribute` syntax.

In Mongo, I do the same thing but without an ORM. I declare objects and insert them. If I want relationships between collections I have to declare them myself, but that's just declaring some foreign key fields. I denormalize my data model in some places so I don't have to do that too often, though. And Meteor gives me this interface on the client as well — that along with data reactivity and a pub-sub architecture is a lot of fun to build with.

I've seen a lot of hate for Mongo and I'm not sure why. SQL and NoSQL databases are both capable of doing the same thing, they just have different use cases that they excel at. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRoy6I4gKWU) is the clearest talk I've seen explaining their differences, and having watched that I'm unsure of why people are so rabidly for or against each type of database.

Remember that Meteor only just reached v1.0. There still is much to come from the platform. Redis support is being implemented currently, and shows great promise: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/meteor-core/Jl5Jt7... Several people are working to integrate standard SQL support, too: https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql http://www.lshift.net/blog/2013/02/25/live-updates-to-meteor...

It was a big concern at first for me, too. But the platform is so much fun to develop with I decided to start developing with it anyways. Seeing the pace at which things are developing with the platform, and knowing about these non-Mongo data store efforts, I am certain that this won't be a drawback for the platform for very long.

AFAIK The reactive part is not that easy to with Mysql et al - sure, you can hack around stored procedures, UDF and such, but it's far from being elegant. If you "think in SQL", then of course nosql seems to make everything difficult, but in reality, you're just taking back some of the logic and heavy lifting from the DB server in exchange for more freedom/scalability, which may or may not be something you want.

Thanks to all for the intelligent replies.

I 'think SQL' all day, or at least a simple subset of it, and I need to learn more. It's paying my bills as a .NET/JavaScipt dev, you know? I'd like to integrate it into my hobby projects. But I'm gonna watch that video linked above and see what it sells me. I certainly don't have any innate resistance to thinking of data as (basically) JSON arrays. I love that. We use that sorta stuff all the time at work, passing data back and forth, to and from the core client JavaScript functions.

I just can't shake the notion that NoSQL is so popular because SQL just is NOT. And I get that: SQL is freaking complicated once you get to the parts that make it so powerful. But maybe that's all a misunderstanding on my part.

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