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Comment by engendered | Hacker News Reader

I really believe that the root of MongoDB's success is how easy they made getting started: A trivial installer, no configuration, and a trivial tutorial -- boom, suddenly a million developers were on their side.

It seems ridiculous, really -- developers commit to something because it saves them hours at the start, versus considering the months of work following -- but many technologies followed this curve. MySQL was a lot easier to start with than pgsql, so it won the early battle. PHP was a no-brainer to start with, etc.

The lesson is that your tool should default to essentially no configuration, no security, and simple beginnings, and it tends to pay off.

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The bigger lesson is that we techies tend to disregard the severity of certain real pains (setup, configuration, up front commitment to schema, etc). And let me tell you, all of us know it, but many of us accept it unquestionably.

Just like node.js. Simple to setup. No frameworks to learn. No need to integrate with web server. Few lines of code, run, and you have a web application responding to the requests.

It's kind of funny, but MongoDB and node.js are a very natural pairing... very little disconnect.

Though I really like RethinkDB, the lack of automated failover handling is about the only concern left keeping me from them. Because of the tooling around it, I'm using ElasticSearch om my next project over both of them. I've also used Cassandra in the past, which was great in some cases, harder in others.

For the past couple years, I've tended to pair an SQL database with a key-value/document store depending on the needs. SQL is the canonical source, and saves are mirrored to the distributed database for wider reads. Most no-sql databases sacrifice parts of CAP/ACID in different ways, and can fit certain growth needs.

When you are faced with paying a over $30-50k/month (hardware, licenses, bandwidth, redundancy) just to host your sql database on hardware big enough to handle the load, or distribute... distribution becomes an option. For a company with under a million a year in gross revenue, spending $600/year for the database alone is not an option. Even for larger companies it's probably not the best idea.

There's something to be said for ease of configuration and administration in that mix.

>$30-50k/month

That's a lot. Could you elaborate what kind of hardware and software one gets at that price level?

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