Microsoft SQL Server vs MongoDB: Which is a better fit?

Lew N.: Hi, my name is Lew, I am the Director of Information Technology for Young's Plant Farm. We're an annual and perennial grower supplier for big box retail stores, and I give Microsoft SQL Server a five out of five review. Okay. We chose SQL Server as we shifted away from some of the more mid-range systems that had built-in databases and we also looked at IBM DB2 and we just were very happy with the interface and how well Microsoft SQL Server ported across all of our different servers and applications. The primary reason the value-added reseller that provides the vertical system for growers uses a SQL Server database as its primary database, so we were familiar with SQL for that. As we were shifting into the data warehousing mode and developing our own internal data warehouse, we chose to use the same platform because we were familiar with it and we liked the way it worked, and we knew it was powerful. As with Microsoft products, the installs and the look and fill of the product are pretty much the same across all of their suite of products. SQL Server was very simple to install, didn't really have any licensing issues or anything like that, so we got it up and running. As far as the installation for our data warehouse, we just started creating tables and setting it up the way we needed and morphed and adjusted and enhanced from there. Just getting started was very simple, and from there, we have launched it into the powerful tool that has become for us. If you're looking at a database platform to do your own in-house data warehouse and your own application development, linking with other Microsoft Power, BI power apps, products like that, SQL Server is definitely the product to go with. It is easy to set up, very secure, and very portable to other platforms, very interfaceable to other platforms.

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.