Why You Should Never Use MongoDB
For quite a few years now, the received wisdom has been that social data is not relational, and that if you store it in a relational database, you’re doing it wrong.
.. When Diaspora decided to store social data in MongoDB, we were conflating a database with a cache. Databases and caches are very different things. They have very different ideas about permanence, transience, duplication, references, data integrity, and speed.
.. MongoDB’s ideal use case is even narrower than our television data. The only thing it’s good at is storing arbitrary pieces of JSON. “Arbitrary,” in this context, means that you don’t care at all what’s inside that JSON. You don’t even look. There is no schema, not even an implicit schema, as there was in our TV show data. Each document is just a blob whose interior you make absolutely no assumptions about.