Rediscovering SQL

I've spent the past year or so hacking away on a multitude of NodeJS projects. At the heart of a few has been MongoDB, a pretty capable document orientated database.

MongoDB fits really well with the programming style of a lot of NodeJS / JavaScript devs, as its essentially a well organised JSON file (or files), that integrates well with your existing objects on the the server side e.g. the content of an application/json POST request.

This is all fine and dandy until you start deciding to use Mongo as a relational database. Mongo ISN'T a relational database, and as such doesn't have things like foreign keys. This means that you basically have to write your own relations and spend ages writing fluff to deal with all the use cases.

I had kidded myself into thinking that Mongo was just a JSON friendly relational database.

It took building a project using Mongo and having to write everything from scratch for me to realise how blind I'd been. I had kidded myself into thinking that Mongo was just a JSON friendly relational database. At this point I all but abandoned the project, pushing the idea aside for another day.

Upon starting my next project, I decided to actually assess which database type would be best for the project and, unsurprisingly, a relational database ticked all the boxes. I'd used MySQL in the past when I first learnt SQL and database structure and management, but I decided to go with a name that I'd heard thrown around the office: PostgreSQL. I had done some reading on it and it looked like it performed well in production environments, as well as providing lots of extensibility. I fired up a VM and got to work installing and configuring it. Once I was sat there on a psql command line I started trying out what I could remember of SQL: CREATE TABLE Test;, DROP TABLE Test;. It soon started to come back to me, and once I'd got some tables set up and started actually designing the schema I quickly realised what I'd missed.

So the moral of the story is: use the tool that does the job the best, not the one that's the easiest to use/integrate!