91–100 of 245 posts
In general, I'm convinced SQL is like Constitutional Democracy; it's not perfect, but it's better than any alternative humans have come up with so far.
MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database. The RethinkDB retrospective[0] contains a lot of insight into how MongoDB has succeeded despite being vastly inferior on a technical level back when it first launched. I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully. Choice quote: Every t…
From that post mortem: It was unfathomable to us why people would choose a system that barely does the thing it’s supposed to do (store data), has a big kernel lock, throws away errors at random, implements single node features that stop working when you shard, has a barely working sharding system despite it being one of the core features of the product, provides essentially no correctness guarantees, and exposes a h…
Jsonb is a pretty recent addition to postgres, when compared with the MongoDB timeline. And even today postgres still doesn't have the replication/failover story that made MongoDB pretty compelling. I know, it's coming, whatever, but the point is that there was a time where if you wanted a json store that could stay alive through network issues, MongoDB was one of the only choices available, and postgres simply didn't have what was needed.
Initially I rode on the Mongo's NoSQL bandwagon when I saw that you can just save a JSON hash and thought that's the coolest thing in the world. But ever since I tried out Postgres's JSONB, I just can't go back to Mongo anymore. With Postgres, I have the best of both worlds, performance, relational data, and reliability. I don't have to sacrifice any of it. Also, I don't know who codes using raw SQL, it's been years languages have had ORMs that made queries look just like a Mongo query.
Also, for anything else, like a super simple requirement of saving data (JSON), Firebase have fit that role perfectly.
Mongo is starting to look like it's out of place in the eco system.
MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database. The RethinkDB retrospective[0] contains a lot of insight into how MongoDB has succeeded despite being vastly inferior on a technical level back when it first launched. I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully. Choice quote: Every t…
It's linked in the RethinkDB essay, but it's always worth explicitly calling out the "Worse Is Better" essay: http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html Ignore its lessons at your peril. Your job isn't to build an engineering masterpiece. Your job, as pg says, is to build something people want.
The way that I understand it is that what is "Good" depends on how you measure it. When we measure in terms of technical quality, we get one answer. When we measure in terms of suited to be widely adopted, we get a different answer.
We tend to idealize for technical quality, but popularity is what matters more. And once something is widely enough adopted, the technical inferiority tends to be fixable.
MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database. The RethinkDB retrospective[0] contains a lot of insight into how MongoDB has succeeded despite being vastly inferior on a technical level back when it first launched. I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully. Choice quote: Every t…
There is a trend I noticed where I work. Most people that “get it right” the first time around do not get any recognition whatsoever. It is the people that screw up, release with big flaws that the customer then pressures the company about, that are heralded as heroes and bacon savers when the fix those flaws. After 3 years and as many releases.
There's going to be a ton of survivorship bias even with them. It just goes to show that big marketing budgets are such a competitive advantage that can outweigh not actually being any good.
I'd seriously like somebody with a passing knowledge of data integrity who believes the tech industry is meritocratic to explain what they think the success of mongo is all about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, PostgreSQL is a very good example of a successful implementation of the opposite strategy, that is, "correctness first". And since PostgreSQL fills that niche very well (correctness + real ACID + extensibility + decent performance), maybe it was really PostgreSQL who killed RethinkDB?
If you're playing the long game and not looking to make a profit that's fine, but PostgreSQL as a company would have been doomed a long time ago. You have to keep in mind the timelines of the business and what they need to do to keep the lights on. MongoDB has identified a real pain point: many developers don't like to use SQL to interface with a transactional database. I'm not going into the merits of SQL vs. NoSQL,…
PG has astonishing feature throughput. With each yearly release, they add 1-3 wow features, 6-10 major features, and countless smaller features still worthy of the release notes.
That's really, really impressive for any database, commercial or otherwise.
There's a perception that postgres is slow to add features because sometimes the feature latency is high. The reason for that is they build a solid foundation first, and slowly build multiple major features on top of that foundation. Consider replication:
1. Write ahead log (WAL) 2. WAL archiving 3. Warm standby 4. Hot standby + Streaming replication 5. Synchronous replication 6. Logical decoding of WAL 7. Logical replication
That's a lot of engineering work there, but they delivered value to users at each stage along the way. And during this time, they did a ton of other stuff -- did you notice that we got parallel query along the way? And logical table partitioning came along too, which means the parallel query can now do partition-wise parallel joins.
Not to mention all of the SQL features and tons and tons of other stuff.
Postgres has kept the lights on for a lot of companies for a long time. I absolutely reject the idea that good engineering is at odds with business success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a trend I noticed where I work. Most people that “get it right” the first time around do not get any recognition whatsoever. It is the people that screw up, release with big flaws that the customer then pressures the company about, that are heralded as heroes and bacon savers when the fix those flaws. After 3 years and as many releases.
>Most people that “get it right” the first time around do not get any recognition whatsoever. I've heard similar complaints before. And, I get it, too-- at a glance, that person is playing the "superhero" by saving the project. But, good management will insist on root causing failures where this will unravel. If it's a recurring problem, you should bring it up with management.
You can have management that understand tech who will get to the bottom of the problem and you can have management who don't understand tech. They won't.
Management who don't understand tech will either keep somebody on hand who they know and trust who does understand tech (e.g. a consultant) or, more likely, they'll just keep rewarding the faux superheroes who keep screwing up and bailing themselves out.
MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database. The RethinkDB retrospective[0] contains a lot of insight into how MongoDB has succeeded despite being vastly inferior on a technical level back when it first launched. I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully. Choice quote: Every t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database. I have no idea how capable MongoDB is these days, as I haven't used Mongo in years (and even then it was not for long). However, I do not know any developers who, after living through the "hype first, features later" strategy, have been left with a positive enough opinion…
Epic had a post mortem blog post here that mentioned in passing they had stumped all the experts they could find to look at unsolveable issues they had with MongoDB. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16340462 I kind of assumed the fix is going to be a rewrite with Postgres or MySQL.
Wow. In v3.6 they started supporting complex joins and in next major release ACID is also coming. It would make it most flexible database ever. I would love to see RocksDB as storage engine instead of WiredTiger in their future releases.
You might be interested in this: http://mongorocks.org/ MongoDB has plug-able storage engines.