Now, a single recursive table isn’t really a good reason to completely switch the database used by an application, but it got us thinking: Why were we using MongoDB? What benefits was it offering? It was hard to find how to query a recursive structure using the MongoDB query language.Īs I worked on this, scouring the documentation and Q&A websites to find ways to query this data efficiently, I began to realize that it was a problem that could be easily solved with PostgreSQL’s recursive queries. Representing that hierarchy within Mongo was difficult, and querying it even more so. Part of the database involved representing artifacts found at a site using a specific type hierarchy defined by the state government. PostgreSQLįirst, why was MongoDB difficult to use in our case? The biggest difficulty was using their query language for certain aspects of our database. However, after a while, things started to get difficult and we began to consider why we were using MongoDB, and what might be better. For the most part, this architecture and choice of technology worked well, and I was quickly able to make meaningful contributions to the app both in the user interface and in the backend. When I joined the project, it used React on the front-end, Node.js on the back-end, GraphQL as the API interface, and MongoDB as the database.
Recently I worked on a web app designed for tracking, editing, and reporting on archaeological survey data.
