Had a project today that I figured might be a good use case for MongoDB.  Since I’ve never used that tech before, I started googling around to see if my use case would be a good fit.

As it turns out, I can probably just use a combination of MySQL and Amazon S3 and make it easier and cheaper than using MongoDB, but along the way I found a great read: Why You Should Never Use MongoDB by Sarah Mei.  She talks about using MongoDB as a replacement for a relational database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) and how it doesn’t fit that use case in real-world situations.  If you’ve got some random JSON data and that data can be of formatting any-which-way, then MongoDB works great.  It also seems to work well as a cache layer between a RDBMS and code, but as a straight up replacement to an RDBMS? Nope.