Spiking MongoDB as our data store

justonsky commented 4 years ago

Coming from the discussion in #21:

Objective

To explore the feasibility of using MongoDB as our data store.

MongoDB's a well-known, pretty popular solution for a database. It has issues (see recent news), but:

There is a free tier for its database service, Atlas
The DB's in the cloud
There is a huge community and many resources to get us started

So, MongoDB is a huge contender in that like Airtable it can help us get our Showcase running quick, with the added benefit of no API rate limit when accessing our data.

Collaborators

This will be owned by the data team: @esu2020 @pandevim @justonsky.

Deliverable

An MongoDB prototype, information from mentors who've used MongoDB in the past, anything to develop our understanding of what it would take for us to use MongoDB as our data store.

pandevim commented 4 years ago

Mongodb is a fully fledged enterprise database solution, but do we really need that in the SoS showcase website? I think it will increase unnecessary complexity. The moment I write this comment we don't have plans for writes and only reads means the website belongs to "Staic Website" category. In retrospect we need a simple, easy to setup serverless db application which covers our minimum requirements. I explored these solutions in this issue: #26

justonsky commented 4 years ago

The moment I write this comment we don't have plans for writes and only reads means the website belongs to "Static Website" category

That's a really good point I didn't even pause to consider. For the time being we'll be the ones seeding our source with data, so you're right, it'll introduce unneeded complexity. From my own exploration of MongoDB, some pain points I've encountered were those that indeed back up your points:

Lack of an easy-to-use web interface to manipulate and see our data: To interact with data in a GUI you must download MongoDB Compass, and the way the data is presented there is not friendly at all.
Adding new data is a pain: Since its document-based, to add a new row you write out the JSON yourself in MongoDB Compass as opposed to just entering a new cell on spreadsheet-based solutions. If you have a CSV file you can import that but I do not think that would work for our Project schema.
Intermediary setup: Need to setup a server connecting to the database, etc.

With that in mind, I totally agree with you, simple is best.

phil-ociraptor commented 4 years ago

One other NoSQL option to consider is Firebase.

Personally, I think SQL is a great choice for us in the long run (depending on the needs of the project), but it's little bit more heavyweight to get started. Definitely the most involved of everything we've looked at.

phil-ociraptor / sos-landing