Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

svs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 213 posts

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#131

Post by nerd_in_rage »

taligent wrote: post #114
gregjor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add that email and Facebook postings and Instagram photos don't require the same kind of data consistency and durability that medical records, bank transactions, or rail car movements require. If Google loses some old emails or Facebook loses the last thousand "likes" on a Jersey Shore fan page that's not much of a catastrophe, and they don't guarantee their data anyway. For those use cases Mongo or Cassandra et…

This is complete and utter nonsense. Facebook and Instagram itself I imagine would care VERY much if data went missing as it would mean not just (a) user data going missing but (b) potentially huge inconsistencies in the social graph. Unless you have some evidence that those companies do not care about data durability ?

What? It's the absolute truth. If someone's wall post or tweet goes missing, it's totally inconsequential.

"Social graph" - LOL.

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#132

Post by blaines »

ozataman wrote: post #99
blaines wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, I believe your comment is not very open minded. I believe the obvious answer is "Of course there's a use case!", just like there's obviously a use case for RDBMS, NoSQL (Mongo, Cassandra, BigTable, Redis, etc) serves a purpose. I'll give you a couple examples. Google stores a huge amount of data in BigTable [1] which is fundamental for the operation of Gmail at scale. Another, Facebook initially used Ca…

I'm not sure if Cassandra and Bigtable are "document" databases in the same vein as MongoDB. These guys are more like turbo-charged key-value stores - which is quite different. They trade in the ability to manipulate data for an ability to scale out linearly and have no singular point of failure (and of course various other trade-offs). Cassandra nicely gives you composite columns and column-key sorting, but that's a…

"NoSQL is simply a buzzword. It basically means 'anything but the old and trusty MySQL server in the attic', which includes a lot of alternative storage mechanisms. Even a simple text file can be considered a NoSQL solution"

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4255895/why-googles-bigta...

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#133

Post by gregjor »

daleharvey wrote: post #129
gregjor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is more like fashion than science in this regard. Every decade or so something truly new happens in the software world. All the rest is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing. If you're young or new to programming it's easy to mistake the buzz around things like NoSQL for innovation when they are usually re-discoveries of old (and often discarded or obsolete) ideas dressed up in new clothes. There's al…

I cannot remember a more aggravating discussion on Hacker News. A lot of people who are working with / building and using 'NoSQL' databases are the very same people building the RDBMS tools that you are so eager to defend. You have stated elsewhere that you do not know anything about 'NoSQL' stores, so instead of insulting a huge number of people far more experienced than yourself, why dont you attempt to learn? (or…

I cannot remember a more aggravating discussion on Hacker News.

I suggest taking exchanges of opinion less personally.

You have stated elsewhere that you do not know anything about 'NoSQL' stores

No, I didn't. I have read about them, gone to conferences, and gone through tutorials for a few NoSQL products, but haven't had a use for them in my own work. Since I have 35+ years of programming and database experience I am not viewing these things through the eyes of a newb. And I have lots of experience with database management pre-RDBMS. I did say I haven't found any use for the current batch of NoSQL tools in my own projects, but obviously lots of other people have. And I have clearly indicated that everything I write is my opinion based on my experience, not word from on high. Again, get a grip.

instead of insulting a huge number of people far more experienced than yourself

No insult intended. My opinions, your mileage may vary. Ad hominem attacks are, on the other hand, deliberate insults.

why dont you attempt to learn? (or at the very least, avoid disregarding the thoughts of a huge sector of the industry)

Thanks for the career advice. My advice to you and some of the other commenters frothing at the mouth is to disconnect your ego from your preferred tools.

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#134

Post by gregjor »

taligent wrote: post #123
pessimizer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of NoSQL guys are not Twitter, Foursquare, Google, or Amazon, and Twitter, Foursquare, Google, and Amazon all have plenty of people experienced enough in traditional RDBMS to tell them what things would probably be better in them. Most NoSQL guys I meet have little to no experience in SQL. Plenty have lots.

The plural of anecdote is not data. You know that right ? In my case every NoSQL developer I've met had a lot of experience in SQL as well. But do you have ask why so called inexperienced users are choosing NoSQL in the first place ? Hint: it's because most RDBMS are ridiculously complex and inflexible.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

OK...

every NoSQL developer I've met had a lot of experience in SQL

THAT is what data looks like, FTW.

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#135

Post by effinjames »

calm down redditors, he just need a basic non majestic scale solution, SQL fitted him very well. large scale data aggregation needs to address disk and network latency, that's where NoSQL shines. and if you operate at large scale no 1 single simple tool will do justice, remember quote from google, 'at scale everything breaks'?

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#136

Post by PommeDeTerre »

taligent wrote: post #122
gaius wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The guys at FB or Google are just guys like you and me, don't believe the hype, they are not superheroes or gurus despite their much talked about interview process (the Google interviews I did were a walk in the park compared to GS, btw). Some will know more than me sure, but some'll know less.

Those were only a few examples. I can keep listing companies that use sharding. The idea that it is some 1980's approach to scaling databases is laughable.

You're right, it isn't a 1980s approach. I recall hearing about it in the mid 1970s, and even then it was probably originally devised in the 1960s.

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#137

Post by Xorlev »

stingraycharles wrote: post #34
adambard wrote: post #28

As a relative idiot when it comes to this sort of thing, I'd like to insert the following supplementary question: what is the sort of application/dataset for which Mongo is particularly suited? I've used it on small projects, and have enjoyed it. Perhaps my data has just been simple/loosely-coupled enough to never run into these problems? I read a lot of posts like this on HN before every trying Mongo, so I've at lea…

"what is the sort of application/dataset for which Mongo is particularly suited" The majority of the NoSQL databases are based on Amazon's Dynamo: loosely coupled replication. MongoDB is one of the few (next to Hbase and a few others) that adopts Google BigTable's architecture: data is divided in Ranges, and each mongod node serves multiple Ranges. This means MongoDB is able to provide atomicity where it's harder wit…

Mongo's sharding model is the only thing I would call remotely close to BigTable. Everything else is leagues different.

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#138

Post by einhverfr »

daleharvey wrote: post #129
gregjor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is more like fashion than science in this regard. Every decade or so something truly new happens in the software world. All the rest is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing. If you're young or new to programming it's easy to mistake the buzz around things like NoSQL for innovation when they are usually re-discoveries of old (and often discarded or obsolete) ideas dressed up in new clothes. There's al…

I cannot remember a more aggravating discussion on Hacker News. A lot of people who are working with / building and using 'NoSQL' databases are the very same people building the RDBMS tools that you are so eager to defend. You have stated elsewhere that you do not know anything about 'NoSQL' stores, so instead of insulting a huge number of people far more experienced than yourself, why dont you attempt to learn? (or…

In fact I was watching a presentation somewhere (I forget where), where folks were using NoSQL databases as a sort of pre-processing layer for the RDBMS. In this regard it's very useful on the high-end.

Where I am less convinced is outside the high-end, and outside the idea of a transition tier between input and RDBMS (or between RDBMS and output even). As a persistence layer, NoSQL is applicable largely to the subset of cases where Object Oriented Databases were. Here the GP is right that the industry is keen on relearning the same lessons every couple of decades.... However, as pre-processing and post-processing, there seems to me to be a much larger set of use cases out there but again only where the RDBMS is no longer really able to handle everything you want it to do.

Re: Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB

#139

Post by einhverfr »

pnathan wrote: post #95
zemo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB is disproportionately liked by the inexperienced. There are things to like about it, and being able to have sparse secondary b-tree indexes on arbitrary data is, overall, pretty rad. For prototyping, being able to just toss some shit in there, especially when your data comes from an external service and you're not in control of your incoming data (very common these days), it works great for simple use cases a…

What I like about Mongo is that it's very free-form; I can splat some data in there and not be too concerned about it until later on. I don't really like dealing with file systems for holding data. Of course Mongo ain't the best at relational data... :o

But this is the fundamental trade-off isn't it?

If you aren't concerned about your data on input then you can't reliably transform it on output, right?

In this regard fixed schemas slow down one side of development (handling input) but speed up another side (handling output, and related tasks like reporting).

Post reply on HN