I was chatting with a guy at a barbecue who'd just finished a General Assembly Web Development Immersive course and had just been hired as one of 3 developers.
Asking what his stack was he said something to the effect of "Rails, with a MongoDB backend".
I pressed him further asking how far along the project was, and found out they had just started. He seemed offended when I suggested that leading with Mongo was a premature optimization. "But we're just dealing with blobs of json".
Admittedly, I have no idea what this guy's name is, or the company he worked for (and this is therefore unadulterated speculation), but my bet is that they have either collapsed from the world of shit they created for themselves, or they've had to hire someone (or several) to dig them out of said world of shit and it's cost them quite dearly.
Don't get me wrong, NoSQL has its place, but not as the "paper of record" for the very beginning of a project.
[Edit: kinda skipped over my point, which was that it's never "just a blob of json", it has structure which, if not explicitly defined somewhere, will bite you in the ass]
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Isaac Newton.
"Let's shove my head into my own ass. NOSQL!" - said by too many young and aspiring developers.
It's a leap backwards to the seventies and DL/1, but without transactions, that's what it is.
Edit:
I have never worked with a system that have blobs of "data" and that's been in production for a while, where that turned out to be a good decision.
Also, data integrity is hard. Building it on your own, is really hard. Most people have trouble getting it right when the hard bits are already provided for them.
SQL isn't perfect, but it's the easy way out 99 times out of 100.
The problem is really that SQL isn't the easiest way to, starting from nothing, take some data, manipulate it and display it on screen. You have to take a couple of steps to set up a schema, take the data you have, convert it to that schema then manipulate it and display it on screen.
Mongo and its ilk give you instant gratification and a tremendously false sense of productivity. It's the easiest way for step 1 without question, it's steps 2 and onwards where it starts to show its problems.
Asking what his stack was he said something to the effect of "Rails, with a MongoDB backend".
I pressed him further asking how far along the project was, and found out they had just started. He seemed offended when I suggested that leading with Mongo was a premature optimization. "But we're just dealing with blobs of json".
Admittedly, I have no idea what this guy's name is, or the company he worked for (and this is therefore unadulterated speculation), but my bet is that they have either collapsed from the world of shit they created for themselves, or they've had to hire someone (or several) to dig them out of said world of shit and it's cost them quite dearly.
Don't get me wrong, NoSQL has its place, but not as the "paper of record" for the very beginning of a project.
[Edit: kinda skipped over my point, which was that it's never "just a blob of json", it has structure which, if not explicitly defined somewhere, will bite you in the ass]