For the past year or two I was trying to jump around from one nosql system to another. I was unsatisfied with traditional relational database systems, and looking for something more flexible. My main annoyance with sql databases was this:
- The data format is rigid, and migrations are annoying.
Really. That’s it. That was my only complaint. At the time I didn’t realize it of course; I thought that “migrations are annoying” is a genuine reason to hate SQL.
Well, it kinda is, if there was an alternative system that has all the benefits/usefulness of SQL but without the annoyance of migrations. And that’s what I thought I would get from the nosql systems. But it turned out that each system has its own set of annoyances, and sometimes they are much worse than the migrations annoyance.
At the end of the day, it turns out that it’s much easier to develop for SQL databases, simply because:
- They’ve been around longer, so they’re more mature, and there exists mature and full-featured ORMs/libraries for them.
- They provide a flexible and powerful declarative querying language (the whole point of SQL: structured querying language).
- Imposing a structure on your data is actually a good thing. It offloads some of the cognitive effort which you’d otherwise have to carry around in your head all the time.
While migrations are annoying, you just have to learn to deal with it and come up with a personal system for yourself to make it as routine and mindless as possible.