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Forest Hoffman
Forest Hoffman

Posted on • Updated on

What are favorite features of MongoDB?

Hey y'all! πŸ‘‹

If you use MongoDB, for work or side-projects, what are your favorite features? What makes it worth using, for you?

Likewise, what are you least favorite features? What's a real pain in your backside?

I'm curious how other folks experiences have been!

Cheers!

Top comments (7)

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

Aggregation framework. Very stepwise, and easy to understand.

There seem to be real-time features as well.

What MongoDB is missing are,

  • $lookup / JOIN performance
  • Complex aggregation performance, sometimes. Not sure if RDBMS would do it better.

Foreign key constraint is also missing, but I don't think it is important for me.

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peter_jachim profile image
Peter Jachim

I found a use case to replace a Postgres database of open data sources I was maintaining for my job. The data was being pulled from a few sources into Mongo, but it took a lot of time to process and create tables and load the data where I wanted it. I switched to mongo, mostly using the PyMongo API. It took me an afternoon to watch some videos get it installed, and rewrite a half dozen pipelines to load the data into MongoDB.

I loved that I was able to learn enough to get what I needed out of it in a few hours, and haven’t needed to go back into it since. I am also able to add new data sources faster than I used to, so I am way more productive.

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foresthoffman profile image
Forest Hoffman

That's great Peter! Finding a more efficient solution always feels amazing.

The lower barrier to entry is also very nice.

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djnitehawk profile image
DΔ΅ ΞΞΉΞ“ΞžΞ—Ξ›ΟˆΞš

c# guy here. coming from a sql+entity framework background, the learning curve for mongodb was massive for me. but I'm never going back to that god-aweful tables+columns+rows nightmare again. my apps don't need an ORM layer anymore. thinking in objects/entities all the way down to the DB is a huge convenience. it's super fast for most use cases. the aggregation framework can run circles around sql queries imho. sharding/ replicating is easy enough. i developed my own library on top of the official mongo driver simplifying the API and adding some features such as migrations, fuzzy text search, gridfs alternative, easy relationships, etc. I've written a few articles about those here on DEV if anyone's interested.

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foresthoffman profile image
Forest Hoffman

I'll have to take a look at those articles!

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madza profile image
Madza • Edited

I like it cause it works well with Node/Express

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madalinignisca profile image
Madalin Ignisca • Edited

Streams. If you will read about it in official docs, you might understand one piece of what makes YouTube so performant. Also will make tou understand some secret concepts of how some S3 stuff works.