I guess I just don't find schema that big a deal even in the early goings. A relational DB schema isn't necessarily hard to change and adapt on the fly. I don't feel like this is the best thing for Mongo to hang its hat on, and I'm not sure they really are. I think its users tend to point at this as a big feature more than they should.
I feel like the other reasons to use Mongo should show up more in these discussions than this "It's easy to make schema changes". Perhaps these are easier scaling/sharding, I don't know, I don't use Mongo. I just see the schema part of this as a sidepoint (albeit an important one from an application design perspective). There are legitimate cases where supremely simple schema flexibility is desirable, but I suspect a lot of people who think they need this really don't (there are easy ways to do this with relational DBs), and are in fact making some things more complicated as a result.
While it IS very easy to change your schema with Mongo, let's not forget that you're going to need to enforce certain schema-related rules in your codebase instead of the DB now.
I feel like the other reasons to use Mongo should show up more in these discussions than this "It's easy to make schema changes". Perhaps these are easier scaling/sharding, I don't know, I don't use Mongo. I just see the schema part of this as a sidepoint (albeit an important one from an application design perspective). There are legitimate cases where supremely simple schema flexibility is desirable, but I suspect a lot of people who think they need this really don't (there are easy ways to do this with relational DBs), and are in fact making some things more complicated as a result.
While it IS very easy to change your schema with Mongo, let's not forget that you're going to need to enforce certain schema-related rules in your codebase instead of the DB now.