I like to use MySQL. How does this differ from MongoDB?
They both store data. That’s roughly where the similarities end. If you have further questions, then please:
- Consider that nobody in this topic referred to MongoDB, we don’t support or provide MongoDB, so I have no idea why you are talking about MongoDB all of a sudden.
- Simple “what is” questions can be answered very easily by searching the web. You really don’t need people to spoonfeed that to you.
- If you want to discuss it on this forum for some reason, please create a separate topic instead of hijacking a random topic about different databases entirely.
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I asked because I am storing mostly photos and some documents. I have been dabbling with Piwigo (older looking) and newer services like Immich and Nextcloud. MariaDB is listed, and was wondering what humans like you think about the different databases. I know I can talk to Gemini, Copilot, MetaAI, and Grok, but for the most part they just give the same “instructional” info. I will definitely go to places like that for installation purposes, but I thought first I would ask people who have sites up and running what their preferences and experiences are first. I will create a separate thread. I wasn’t trying to hijack. Bye Jack.
I’m personally not a fan of MongoDB. I just don’t see the point of it.
Traditional, relational databases (like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite) store data in tables, with each table having a fixed structure, with a fixed number of columns and fixed constraints on what can be stored in them. It’s basically like a big Excel file.
Document databases (like MongoDB) do not have this fixed structure. This flexibility can be nice when you are storing data with variable structure, but it means that you have to handle the different formats of data from your application as well, which is more error prone.
To clarify: the “document” in document databases does not refer to things like a Word or PDF document, a “document” is more or less the equivalent of a table row, but without the fixed structure.
Regardless, any of this is only relevant if you’re building your own application. Off the shelf software like Nextcloud and Piwigo is written to work with a specific type of database. And that’s almost always a relational database. Some applications can work with different types of relational databases (e.g. supporting both MySQL/MariaDB and SQLite), but not databases with very different behavior.
And they do not store files in the database, those are just stored as files on disk. The database is only used for the administration on top of it.
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