In the early 2010s, MongoDB was everywhere. Meetups, blog posts, hackathons everyone was saying the same thing: Forget SQL. Just store JSON and ship faster.
And for a certain kind of project, MongoDB was a breath of fresh air. No schemas, easy to install, and “web scale” (a phrase that became a meme after that infamous video).
But hype doesn’t last forever.
What Problem Did MongoDB Solve?
Back then:
Startups wanted to build fast without getting bogged down in database schema design.
Developers hated ALTER TABLE migrations just to add a single field.
The world was moving toward JSON APIs — storing JSON directly made sense.
MongoDB gave you:
Schema-less storage : Add a new field to your documents without a migration.
Developer-friendly : Query with a syntax that felt closer to JavaScript than SQL.
Horizontal scaling : Shard your data across servers to handle large workloads.
