Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, team, gather 'round the smoldering remains of this latest "proposal." I've just finished reading this... manifesto... from another database vendor promising to solve problems we didn't know we had. They seem to think the finance department runs on hopes and buzzwords. Let's apply some basic arithmetic to their sales pitch, shall we?
Their opening gambit is to frame standard, battle-tested SQL JOINs as a hilarious antique. "Here’s the funny part," they say, pointing out that JOINs create duplicated data in the results. The only thing funny is the audacity. They've "solved" this by creating a massive, nested JSON object that our applications then have to parse. They've just shifted the workload from the database to the client and called it innovation. What they don't put in the brochure is the cost of increased network traffic and the CPU cycles our app servers will burn unpacking these data-matryoshka dolls. They're not eliminating a cost; they're just hiding it in someone else's budget. Classic.
Next, we have the grand unveiling of their revolutionary two-step process to do what one simple command has done for half a century. First, you $lookup to get the "application-friendly" nested data. Then, when you realize you actually need to process it like a normal dataset, you use $unwind to flatten it back out. So, they mock the result of a JOIN, then proudly demonstrate a more verbose, proprietary way to achieve the exact same result. This isn't a feature; it's a Rube Goldberg machine for data retrieval. I can already hear the support tickets and the consulting fees piling up.
They praise the virtues of a "flexible schema," which is financial code for "a complete lack of accountability." The claim is that it's an advantage to not have NULL values for an outer join. In reality, it's an open invitation for developers to throw whatever they want into the database. Three years from now, when we need to run a quarterly analysis, the data science team will spend six weeks just trying to figure out if dept is the same as department or dpt. That "flexibility" is a blank check we'll be paying for in data cleanup and lost business intelligence for a decade.
Let's do some quick math on the "Total Cost of Ownership." The initial license is, let's say, $100,000. Now we add the "hidden" costs. Migration will require retraining our entire data team, who are perfectly proficient in SQL. Let's conservatively budget $250,000 for training, lost productivity, and hiring a few 'document model specialists'. Then comes the inevitable performance tuning consultant when our queries grind to a halt, another $150,000. And we can't forget the future "Data Integrity Project" to clean up the flexible schema mess, a cool half-million. So their $100k solution is actually a $1 million Trojan horse. Their claimed ROI is not just optimistic; it's fiscally irresponsible fan-fiction.
MongoDB provides a consistent document model across both application code and database storage... to deliver structured, ready‑to‑use JSON objects directly from the database.
They’re not selling a database; they’re selling a career path for their consultants. Proposal denied.