Coverage from The Register of Mark Porter’s comments at AWS re:Invent about DocumentDB’s compatibility claims. “It is not MongoDB compatible. That is an untruth… it is 34 per cent compatible, through our tests. Most importantly, for our users and our customers, it is not compatible in all the ways that make MongoDB magical.” — Mark Porter, MongoDB CTO Read the full article on The Register
People ask me this often enough that I decided to put it on my home page: “Aren’t you one of the SQL folks? Why would one of you join MongoDB?” For me, it was always about delighting customers; SQL and Relational were just a means to that end. Databases are indeed amazing because of the promises around data in terms of consistency, ease of use, and durability that they make to customers. I sat with one of my old relational friends about a year ago, in Oct of 2019, before MongoDB was even a gleam in my eye, and we decided that 30 years into our careers, databases were still hard to use by operators and developers, but especially developers (cloud has made operator job a lot easier). They were also still unpredictable and didn’t defend themselves against misuse. Not only that, but scalability and distribution were bolted on as afterthoughts rather than core elements of the product – making scaling either difficult or impractical or brittle. ...