Oh god, all the people storing massive JSON documents, and then having to lock the whole thing to modify sub-entities.

But is Elasticsearch web scale?

Or add a column next to the json with some data about the json and index that.

Where I work we use mongo, it's not what I would've picked but i guess it helped early dev speed and bad practices like having productus do direct db edits to save a situation because the app isn't mature yet.

By now when collections are getting huge and documents as well we've had to archive more and more recent data, which causes problems, and we have to really make sure our queries are sharp or cost and lag will go through the roof.

With that said, it actually works pretty ok for a production platform with quite a big customer base, and there are many improvements we could do if we had the time.

If I were there at day one I'd have rooted for sql, mainly based on how much these different collections have to relate, but I don't think mongo is as horrible as many people make it out to be and it does have upsides.

I've used it for one small project and quite liked it. I struggle with the concepts behind relational databases and Mongo's approach was understandable for me.

used OpenSearch in a recent project, but the number of annoyances with it are through the roof. From SSL certs setup to bad defaults in settings, and the fact it does type inference for indices requiring you to manually recreate the index, and the docker container that takes 30s to start every time...

If you can use mongo, just use that. Or pick something other than OpenSearch if that's overkill for you.