040: Automaticity Is a Weird Word

Working Code

The other day, Ben was listening to an episode of the MongoDB podcast in which Mat Keep shared a story about the adding of atomic transactions into the MongoDB product. Mat said that the engineer who spearheaded the effort used to joke about the fact that his team was spending a huge amount of time working on a feature that 90% of developers would never need. For Ben - who leans heavily on transactions for referential integrity - this sounded like an crazy statement. But is it? Are database transactions overrated? Or, is it more so that the type of use-cases that work best in a document database are also the type of uses-cases that don't really need transactions?

On today's episode, the crew talks about how they use databases; the role of atomic transactions in the reduction of application complexity; and, whether or not they've ever felt "held back" by the limitations of a relational database management system. Full disclosure, all of the hosts have far more experience with traditional databases when compared to NoSQL databases.

NOTE: In the show, Ben mentioned that a document database like MongoDB can't enforce schemas like a relational database. And while this was true in earlier versions of the MongoDB product, it is no longer true. In recent updates, MongoDB has added schema validation and enforcement.

Notes & Links

• MongoDB Podcast: Episode 67 - MongoDB Evolved with Mat Keep

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.