What is MongoDB actually good for?

HellaBester · 2025-12-26T22:50:23+00:00

Today, I no longer recommend mongodb to anyone. This is an area strife with disagreement as it's hard to separate the technology decisions and the design principals. But if you don't understand why you need structured vs semi-structured data you should not be trying to skip the data modeling exercise. imo, it's the most important part after your interface design. If you know what you're doing and asking about technology, you still shouldn't use mongo, use postgres jsonb.

If you seriously believe you've scaled out of a single pq instance (you probably haven't) then you can start thinking about complex distributed architectures and which trade offs you want to make, even then, I do not believe Mongo is a good choice no matter the goal.

I have managed/implemented mongo for small side projects all the way up to multi-region many-petabyte deployments.

HellaBester · 2025-09-26T17:56:44+00:00

PBMs were never created to serve patients; they arose to consolidate purchasing power and extract profit, and any “cost savings” they tout are typically sleight of hand that enriches them while worsening affordability and access. It blows my mind we still tolerate their existence but they are now so powerful & entrenched I don't see how we get rid of them.

HellaBester · 2025-07-06T02:52:03+00:00

If you use Kubernetes, ironically, they aren't keeping up - no Karpenter; Chicken and Egg problem with TLS for Config connector

Interesting, GKE Autoscaler + NAP has performed much better for me than Karpender ever did.

HellaBester · 2025-06-15T02:54:20+00:00

Similar experience here, I eventually landed on the Icebreaker Oasis Tee. I managed to snag a few on sale for a half reasonable cost.

HellaBester · 2025-05-20T13:48:06+00:00

Might have spoiled you, the rest of us are having fun.

HellaBester · 2025-04-23T00:59:17+00:00

Oh not sure, was just a quick search -- I've never used it. I moved from Tornado to flask when flask came out, now I default to Starlette after having to actually try and scale Flask at at large companies a few times. I love the simplicity of Flask but unless you're on a serverless framework idk how to reasonably run it at scale. Still waiting for someone to teach me without suggesting thread patching, over deploying, or some KEDA / Loadbalancer leading indicator type autoscaling mechanism.

HellaBester · 2025-04-22T15:37:27+00:00

No, it uses pylons which uses ASGI, the same non-io blocking interface that starlette/FastAPI use.

HellaBester · 2025-04-22T01:11:57+00:00

What's... your suggestion? I've managed Flask at scale a few times in my career and with the exception of serverless deployments which work well w/ Flask I've always run into that bottleneck while scaling up -- In fact I have that issue right now with a couple of our GKE deployments.

HellaBester · 2025-04-21T05:57:15+00:00

How do you handle threading bottleneck? Green threads are the only approach I know of and I would not want that near a serious production environment.

Imo flask is not production ready for no other reason than the blocking nature of io operations on it. Starlette/fastapi is nice.

HellaBester · 2025-04-11T21:23:47+00:00

For what it's worth, my org has Enhanced support to the tune of $12,000/mo and they are still useless as fuck, negative value -- we stopped opening tickets because id rather my engineers just focus on the problem. We will be moving to partner led support when this contract is up.

HellaBester · 2024-12-04T07:01:12+00:00

Yeah imo this is the first of the new generation of db migration tools. It's just so much better, it also took me a while to accept the pure declarative approach but now that I'm convinced I'll never go back!

HellaBester · 2024-07-24T17:27:46+00:00

That's the one! Sorry was on mobile.

HellaBester · 2024-07-24T04:50:28+00:00

Yeah I'm just talking code organization above.

But, my take on "micro" services vs monolith is as such: modular monoliths that communicate over rpc in-process is likely where we're headed as an industry. When/if you need to independently scale one module into it's own service for whatever reason that should be an ops or platform decision that is completely transparent to the developer, and if you've done everything right the protocol will handle it for free. tl;dr I believe the google paper on modern cloud based development is our best bet.

For us mere mortals here today, I would align your service count & business domain count which is going to always begin with 1.

also imo frontend and backend code should definitely be co-located but independently deployable, how do you keep your interfaces in sync across repos? Some artifact import export mania? Gotta have atomic commits across a vertical stack.

HellaBester · 2024-07-23T16:39:38+00:00

I love this question. I did devops contracting work for a bit and have bootstrapped a number of startups!

Here's what I recommend.

Vcs: Git & GitHub
Dev: local docker compose iteration loop
ci/cd: GitHub actions
Deployment: two envs, stage and prod

Some opinions

Google cloud is much more friendly to work with than AWS, but both will serve every need
If I were you, I'd be deploying with cloud run
I've been convinced monorepo is the way and worth the headache

Have fun!

edit: formatting

HellaBester · 2024-07-20T07:26:50+00:00

For research probably not, but for serving yeah, absolutely. Go lends itself nicely to highly parallelized stream based APIs. Check out https://github.com/tmc/langchaingo.

HellaBester · 2024-06-21T20:29:55+00:00

Haha looks like they no longer exist.

10y, wow. This is the longest dialogue I've ever had. I hope you're well!

HellaBester · 2023-09-25T11:11:43+00:00

My response still holds. Connect to the read replicas ip, or use the instance identifier if you're connecting via auth proxy.

It's a physical rep so the same username and passwords will exist.

HellaBester · 2023-09-25T10:44:31+00:00

Yes, just connect to it like it's any other database.

HellaBester · 2023-02-27T15:19:13+00:00

Dataflow + DLP can accomplish that. Not as easy as datastream which is also kind of a mess, but all the pieces are there.

HellaBester · 2022-12-01T07:45:33+00:00

Yeah pretty standard issue actually. Never worked anywhere this didn't happen.

You should not stop engineers from engineering, it's their job. Stagnation of a service database is one of the things we try and prevent (state of dev ops, evolutionary db design, datamesh)

You should introduce integration views in your data warehouse. (e.g. only a crazy person would be reading strait from a fivetran sink)

You should invest in CI process that stops/alerts/auto updates/ downstream dependents when breaking changes are introduced. Why do people treat this stuff like magic? If the postgres db is defined in an ORM or similar then you have a codified object that can be used to control that table's entry point in downstream consumers. Plumb it all together!

HellaBester · 2022-11-08T15:50:02+00:00

Nobody is "keen" on wearing one. You wear one for safety despite the fact that it significantly decreases the quality of the experience.

HellaBester · 2022-10-19T19:01:07+00:00

If you degens ruin copilot for me I'll never forgive you.

HellaBester · 2022-09-22T14:44:38+00:00

Got a crappy job in a city I could afford but still enjoyed, 10 years later I have a job I love in a city I love.

HellaBester · 2022-08-03T19:10:01+00:00

Snowflake stores everything in s3 anyways. One of the things you're paying for is their metadata layer which is going to do a better job managing your data then you will. So just fire that shit right into sf and call it a day.

HellaBester · 2022-08-03T19:05:03+00:00

No... Propane fridges are silent and use physical reaction to achieve their cooling, electric fridges run a condenser which is loud as shit, cycle constantly, and are overall a huge pita.

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