I use Mongo sometimes, because it’s easy to set up for quickly storing some data, but it has become easier with other databases too.
Many relational databases can now store JSON directly:
It’s getting easier to set up relational data for small projects too:
- For Node.js, Sequelize and knex are pretty easy to use.
- There is a simple ORM for Python called peewee that makes it easy to persist data.
- I’ve been looking at using databases with Elixir and there are two built-in key-value stores (Erlang Term Storage and Mnesia/Amnesia) as well as Ecto.
- Working with databases in Ruby only requires a few lines of code, and there are some ORMs.
- Most other common languages have similar tools.
It seems like if an app requires defining a schema for relational data, it probably isn’t much faster to do it with Mongo than with another tool these days.