MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database.

The RethinkDB retrospective[0] contains a lot of insight into how MongoDB has succeeded despite being vastly inferior on a technical level back when it first launched. I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully.

Choice quote:

Every time MongoDB shipped a new release and people congratulated them on making improvements, I felt pangs of resentment. They’d announce they fixed the BKL, but really they’d get the granularity level down from a database to a collection. They’d add more operations, but instead of a composable interface that fits with the rest of the system, they’d simply bolt on one-off commands. They’d make sharding improvements, but it was obvious they were unwilling or unable to make even rudimentary data consistency guarantees.

But over time I learned to appreciate the wisdom of the crowds. MongoDB turned regular developers into heroes when people needed it, not years after the fact. It made data storage fast, and let people ship products quickly. And over time, MongoDB grew up. One by one, they fixed the issues with the architecture, and now it is an excellent product. It may not be as beautiful as we would have wanted, but it does the job, and it does it well.

[0] http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html

> MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database.

I have no idea how capable MongoDB is these days, as I haven't used Mongo in years (and even then it was not for long).

However, I do not know any developers who, after living through the "hype first, features later" strategy, have been left with a positive enough opinion of MongoDB to ever want to use it again.

I used it about 3 years ago and my first thought was "How broken will multi-document ACID transactions be?"

I still want to like MongoDB, I still miss its style of query vs SQL, but I'd have a hard time advocating its use again...

Sometimes it's tempting to use it for projects that I know will remain small, but even then it's not worth the overhead of standing up a different DB when I have a perfectly good SQL server I can muddle through already.

Check out Rethink. It seems to be what you're after.

It's probably better to go with Cockroach or TiDB. RethinkDB has problems of its own.