MySQL vs MongoDB: Which is a better fit?

Samuel S.: Hi, my name's Samuel. I'm a director for a website design company, and I recommend MySQL. I'll give it a five out of five, and if you want to see more reviews like this, click the link below. Before using MySQL, I used to use Excel for my data. I used to store my data like that, but I needed a more reliable, more accessible way to get connected to my data, so I decided to use MySQL, which is great. I really like using MySQL, because my data is all in a central location now. It's very secure, as well, and it allows me to have more than one user connecting to the database, and not only that, more than one application, as well, so it can be a single source of truth information, which is what I really like about it. The initial setup is somewhat advanced. I used sort of other tools to set it up. I used WordPress, which installs and sets it up for me. The install and setup is relatively easy, but you can get more advanced when you're doing your own queries into the database itself. There're a lot of database applications out there, but I think MySQL is one of the highly rated ones. A lot of the larger organizations use it, because it's really reliable and secure and safe.

Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Greg. I am an operations fellow at an entrepreneurship center. And I give MongoDB a four out of five. So we switched from Google Sheets, we were using it to store a lot of our membership data, but we found that it was just too unorganized and it wasn't able to handle the amount of data we were processing. We chose MongoDB for a variety of reasons, the primary one is that our staff rotates pretty frequently just as a part of the program and MongoDB is really easy to learn and understand. It's customer friendly for developers, but also it is able to be used by people who don't necessarily have database experience. We found MongoDB to be pretty easy to integrate with our apps. And while there are other services out there that provide similar functionality, the free tier on MongoDB was really a benefit to us and provided us with enough support to get started on the platform, but allows us to grow if we need it in the future. MongoDB was relatively easy to integrate with our system. We were lucky in that we were overhauling a lot of our backend data processing stuff anyways. So MongoDB was just one extra step to add on top of our existing code base. It was relatively easy to add different models and different ways of storing data. And we found that compared to things like SQL that may have a higher learning curve, because MongoDB's very user-friendly experience, we were able to do so without much time committed to learning, which as I mentioned earlier is really great given how often our staff rotates. So it really made the whole process a lot easier and it was one less thing that we had to think about as we were shifting away from our old model. So if you're thinking about trying out MongoDB for your business or service or project, I'd recommend messing around with their playground option. Their free tier is more than enough for a lot of smaller projects and it gives you a chance to learn MongoDB, all the ins and outs and see how easy it is to integrate into your system. I had some questions that were quickly answered through their online programs. But more than that, just being able to use it in my own application, just trying it out. That said, if you are considering MongoDB, look at Google Firebase as well. They have a database, I think it's called Firestore, as a part of the Firebase platform as a whole, but it integrates really nicely with all of the other Google services that are part of the Firebase platform. And what's on top of that, it still uses the same database structure and that all objects are stored as JSON objects. But it integrates with all of their other services pretty well.