Dan McKinley (Etsy) wrote an [IMHO] insightful article Why MongoDB Never Worked at Etsy.

First off, it’s important to realise that it’s not a snipe at MongoDB – it’s a fine tool.

The lessons are related to mixing multiple databases in a deployment (administration and monitoring overhead) and the acknowledgement that issues of schema design, scalability and maintenance need attention regardless of which brand or technology you pick for your database. That comes back to the old insight that migrations are rarely worth it (regardless of what you migrate to what).

I think these are indeed important considerations as they have a major impact on the ongoing costs of your entire environment (production as well as development and testing) – these days we encounter the “we’re doing this part of our application using MongoDB” …