“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
— Abraham Lincoln
My friend does remodeling and construction work.
I asked him once what the biggest lesson he’d learned in his line of work was.
“90% of the job is using the right tool for the right job.”
I think about that every time I open an audit.
Last week I found a MongoDB instance sitting inside a production platform.
Nothing wrong with MongoDB. But what was it being used for?
1. Session management.
Sessions are temporary. They expire. MongoDB has no native TTL enforcement – so someone wrote a cleanup job to delete expired sessions periodically. Which adds write stress. Which needs monitoring. Because if the job fails, data accumulates silently.
Redis exists for exactly this. TTL is built in. Session expires, it’s gone. Zero maintenance.
2. Analytical history tracking.
MongoDB storing historical data that gets queried for trends and reports. Querying document stores for OLAP workloads is painful. Slow. Expensive.
Kafka + a columnar data warehouse. Designed for exactly this. Faster queries, lower cost, scales properly.
3. Payment transaction records.
This one actually needed a proper relational database. ACID compliance. Foreign keys. Referential integrity. Things that matter when money is involved.
PostgreSQL. Or SQL Server. Or MySQL with InnoDB.
(If you’re still running MyISAM — we need to talk 🤣🔫)
Three use cases. Three wrong tools. One database doing a job it was never designed for.
The result? Unnecessary complexity. Write stress. Slow queries. Cleanup jobs that needed babysitting.
We replaced MongoDB with three purpose-built tools.
Less infrastructure. Better performance. Lower cost.
My friend was right.
It’s not about using the best tool.
It’s about using the right one.
- What’s the most misused piece of technology you’ve seen in production?
If this sounds familiar, I do a free 30-minute sanity check. Book here: https://lnkd.in/dBZ8xjEa