About a decade ago, I tried to index the web via the Dewey Decimal System. I had a site laid out similar to Google, where you could browse sites continuously starting from a given call, but the DDS is proprietary, and those people hate anyone who uses their IP without a license. You can Google everyone they’ve shutdown – places that weren’t even libraries – for using anything similar to the DDS. I reached out to the group that manages the DDS, and was taken offline before my project even started.
With all the corporate BS lately, and people looking for alternative options, I thought I’d take a search engine old school, and we’d index like Usenet. Except with an XXX.XXX.XXX format.
My original project used sharded Redis, with append logs to disk. I chose it for its in-memory speed and key-value store. Did some calculations, and I’d have to have millions of records just to consume my entire system’s memory.
I had a lot of plans for this before getting shut down.
Now that I’m older, I’m curious if I should be using MongoDB.
What are the benefits and drawbacks of each? Which would you use? And why?
Mongodb is proprietary.
Postgres is open source, and then there is documentdb which adds a mongodb compatible layer on top.
But it would probably be better just to use postgres + jsonb directly for that case.
Actually, MongoDB is webscale.
But I agree, I’d generally recommend a relational database like Postgres, especially for something that needs to be searchable quickly like an index.
Redis is apparently open-source again, now under AGPL (and two other proprietary licenses). But yeah, can also recommend the fork that spawned when they went proprietary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkey
When did Mongo go proprietary?
Edit: I’m actually wanting to make my entire project open source. MongoDB’s current license, requiring all infrastructure to be open, might actually be for me.
No, the license is not a real OSS license.
The short version is that the requirement of all infrastructure being open, could potentially apply to parts of the stack where you don’t have access to the source code, like the management engine or network card firmware.
It hasn’t been tested in court yet, and because this is unclear, the SSPL is a hot potato nobody wants to touch or test. The possibility of the requirement for closed source firmware to be open, makes the SSPL effectively unusable.
The SSPL is neither Open Source Initiative nor Free Software Foundation approved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License
Currently, SSPL licensed code is best treated as source available, but proprietary code.