But I'd think MongoDB the company increasing in revenue isn't totally related to the quality of MongoDB the database. In fact a lot of their products seem to be targeting the "I don't want to learn how to set it up and understand indexes" crowd.
No. I’d consider adding an index. An index is not free, it comes at a cost and that cost may well be higher than the costs of not having that index. For example, if a reporting query that runs once every few hours is lacking an index, the cost of updating that index on every write (and the disk space/memory used) may well exceed its benefits.
But I've always been curious: as a person who like MongoDB, do you have an opinion about Mongo vs. Couch? Keep in mind that you don't have do convince me that there are niches where that style of DB is appropriate ;-) I'm mostly just interested in the comparison since I've never spent any time looking at MongoDB.
It's great for things like a realtime layer of some app that merges data with a slower and more historical layer of data running on a SQL engine or something safer. Or for services that provide realtime or recent-time analytics, while storing your historical data somewhere else (see any patterns here so far? :P ). In my case the main usage is for an advertising bid and content serving engine, which was pretty much the ideal example use-case for MongoDB mentioned in books I read years ago when first learning it.
Just to note, yes the data integrity problems are "fixed", but only if you configure your instances properly and your read and write statements properly. It's not terribly hard to do, but I don't know if I would really go recommending MongoDB for newbies. If you know how to configure it properly for your data-safety needs, and would benefit from being able to have a flexible schema in early development.... I'd still maybe suggest looking at other document DBs unless you need the read/write speed Mongo can give on simple queries (and fresh projects probably do not need that)
