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MongoDB vs SQLite: What are the differences?
MongoDB: The database for giant ideas. MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding; SQLite: A software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.
MongoDB and SQLite can be categorized as "Databases" tools.
"Document-oriented storage", "No sql" and "Ease of use" are the key factors why developers consider MongoDB; whereas "Lightweight", "Portable" and "Simple" are the primary reasons why SQLite is favored.
MongoDB is an open source tool with 16.3K GitHub stars and 4.1K GitHub forks. Here's a link to MongoDB's open source repository on GitHub.
Uber Technologies, Lyft, and Codecademy are some of the popular companies that use MongoDB, whereas SQLite is used by Intuit, Coderus, and Infoshare. MongoDB has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2189 company stacks & 2218 developers stacks; compared to SQLite, which is listed in 314 company stacks and 477 developer stacks.
Backend:
- Considering that our main app functionality involves data processing, we chose
Python
as the programming language because it offers many powerful math libraries for data-related tasks. We will useFlask
for the server due to its good integration with Python. We will use a relational database because it has good performance and we are mostly dealing with CSV files that have a fixed structure. We originally choseSQLite
, but after realizing the limitations of file-based databases, we decided to switch toPostgreSQL
, which has better compatibility with our hosting service,Heroku
.
We were looking at several alternative databases that would support following architectural requirements: - very quick prototyping for an unknown domain - ability to support large amounts of data - native ability to replicate and fail over - full stack approach for Node.js development After careful consideration MongoDB came on top, and 3 years later we are still very happy with that decision. Currently we keep almost 2TB of data in our cluster, and start thinking about sharding.
After using couchbase for over 4 years, we migrated to MongoDB and that was the best decision ever! I'm very disappointed with Couchbase's technical performance. Even though we received enterprise support and were a listed Couchbase Partner, the experience was horrible. With every contact, the sales team was trying to get me on a $7k+ license for access to features all other open source NoSQL databases get for free.
Here's why you should not use Couchbase
Full-text search Queries The full-text search often returns a different number of results if you run the same query multiple types
N1QL queries Configuring the indexes correctly is next to impossible. It's poorly documented and nobody seems to know what to do, even the Couchbase support engineers have no clue what they are doing.
Community support I posted several problems on the forum and I never once received a useful answer
Enterprise support It's very expensive. $7k+. The team constantly tried to get me to buy even though the community edition wasn't working great
Autonomous Operator It's actually just a poorly configured Kubernetes role that no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to work. The support team was useless. Same lack of documentation. If you do get it to work, you need 6 servers at least to meet their minimum requirements.
Couchbase cloud Typical for Couchbase, the user experience is awful and I could never get it to work.
Minimum requirements
The minimum requirements in production are 6 servers. On AWS the calculated monthly cost would be ~$600
. We achieved better performance using a $16
MongoDB instance on the Mongo Atlas Cloud
writing queries is a nightmare While N1QL is similar to SQL and it's easier to write because of the familiarity, that isn't entirely true. The "smart index" that Couchbase advertises is not smart at all. Creating an index with 5 fields, and only using 4 of them won't result in Couchbase using the same index, so you have to create a new one.
Couchbase UI
The UI that comes with every database deployment is full of bugs, barely functional and the developer experience is poor. When I asked Couchbase about it, they basically said they don't care because real developers use SQL directly from code
Consumes too much RAM
Couchbase is shipped with a smaller Memcached instance to handle the in-memory cache. Memcached ends up using 8 GB of RAM for 5000 documents
! I'm not kidding! We had less than 5000 docs on a Couchbase instance and less than 20 indexes and RAM consumption was always over 8 GB
Memory allocations are useless I asked the Couchbase team a question: If a bucket has 1 GB allocated, what happens when I have more than 1GB stored? Does it overflow? Does it cache somewhere? Do I get an error? I always received the same answer: If you buy the Couchbase enterprise then we can guide you.
Pros of MongoDB
- Document-oriented storage822
- No sql585
- Ease of use544
- Fast462
- High performance404
- Free251
- Open source212
- Flexible177
- Replication & high availability139
- Easy to maintain107
- Querying39
- Easy scalability35
- Auto-sharding34
- High availability33
- Map/reduce29
- Document database26
- Easy setup24
- Full index support24
- Reliable15
- Fast in-place updates14
- Agile programming, flexible, fast13
- No database migrations11
- Enterprise7
- Easy integration with Node.Js7
- Enterprise Support5
- Great NoSQL DB4
- Aggregation Framework3
- Drivers support is good3
- Support for many languages through different drivers3
- Schemaless2
- Managed service2
- Easy to Scale2
- Fast2
- Awesome2
- Consistent1
Pros of SQLite
- Lightweight160
- Portable134
- Simple121
- Sql80
- Preinstalled on iOS and Android28
- Free1
- Telefon1
- Tcl integration1
- Portable A database on my USB 'love it'1
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Cons of MongoDB
- Very slowly for connected models that require joins5
- Not acid compliant3
- Proprietary query language1
Cons of SQLite
- Not for multi-process of multithreaded apps2
- Needs different binaries for each platform1