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Does everyone hate MongoDB?

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Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#41

Post by skyebook »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #20

I think a lot of the "hating" is a side effect of MongoDB being consistently oversold in terms of its capabilities and architecture. Many people who are not experts on databases discover this the hard way later. If the claims about it were qualified a little better and the limitations acknowledged more openly by its proponents it would help to mitigate this outcome. I am indifferent to MongoDB but I do caution people…

Totally agree.

I would only add a lack of thinking on the part of developers who jump on the NoSQL bandwagon for the buzzword without understanding the implications of not having a relational database.

I'm not a RoR fan but the ActiveRecord model is probably enough for 75% of people to get their projects started without having to dig too much.

Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#42

Post by pooriaazimi »

jchrisa wrote: post #23
benatkin wrote: post #8

Does everyone hate MongoDB? - 25 Sept 2012 Headline Problem: Too many people are ranting about MongoDB. Mistake: Too few data points. Overly defensive of MongoDB. Comments: You should probably learn more about Riak. The "From MongoDB to Riak" is light on details but isn't really hand-waving. The author is saying that having a masterless database results in less fretting. http://wiki.basho.com/Riak-Compared-to-MongoDB…

Now that Couchbase Server 2.0 is beta, it's a reliable alternative to MongoDB. Same JSON goodness, different set of user stories. (hint: less rants). Get the beta download here: http://www.couchbase.com/couchbase-server/beta

If you (like me) don't know what's the difference between CouchDB and CouchBase, look here: http://www.couchbase.com/couchdb

Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#43

Post by diego »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #20

I think a lot of the "hating" is a side effect of MongoDB being consistently oversold in terms of its capabilities and architecture. Many people who are not experts on databases discover this the hard way later. If the claims about it were qualified a little better and the limitations acknowledged more openly by its proponents it would help to mitigate this outcome. I am indifferent to MongoDB but I do caution people…

I like the concept of MongoDB. My main problem (which perhaps is not totally clear from my post, linked in the article) is that there are certain historical conventions about what a database should be. In particular, a database will not have the following default behavior:

- return from a write call silently, when the data wasn't written and will not be.

If you are going to break conventions on a multi-decade tradition, there should be warnings everywhere. Not just the Downloads page, but during installation (which is harder to ignore, as the Download page is not seen by people like me who use package managers).

The 32-bit issue is worse. There's no excuse for not warning people that the server they just started is a crippled data store limited to 2GB.

Again, I like MongoDB. Given my experience with software development, those issues are telltale signs of a product in its infancy. Hence the "10 years" title of my post, which of course is hyperbole. But it will take time for Mongo to be user-friendly enough.

By the way, those who say that a piece of software has no need to be as user-friendly as possible, and you should thoroughly read the manual before even experimenting with it simply live in a different world. The more of a head start the software can give you, the better. The fewer the gotchas, the better. That was the philosophy of IndexTank, and it worked.

Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#45

Post by krobertson »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #20

I think a lot of the "hating" is a side effect of MongoDB being consistently oversold in terms of its capabilities and architecture. Many people who are not experts on databases discover this the hard way later. If the claims about it were qualified a little better and the limitations acknowledged more openly by its proponents it would help to mitigate this outcome. I am indifferent to MongoDB but I do caution people…

I agree. In some regards it is "oversold", but I also think part of that is from a lot of the marketing efforts we've seen with newer databases like Mongo and even Riak.

I am not saying those are bad, but with more established DBs like MySQL and PostgreSQL, you never really saw the same kind of marketing efforts towards developers, startups, etc. It is kind of a newer concept.

Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#47

Post by freework »

manishsharan wrote: post #25

I love that MongoDb allows me to get stuff done without much fuss even when I have not figured out the final data requirements. I have been using RDBMS + ORM ( Hibernate) for a very long time; however I found this to be very "rigid" in a start up environment where the requirements are far from frozen. MongoDB is much more flexible and forgiving than traditional RDBMS in that respect.

If you haven't figured out the final data requirements, then you have work to do. Its a corollary of the "give me your data structures and I'll understand your program, give me just your code and I'll still be clueless" mantra. The Database should have a strict schema before code is written. Having a schemaless datastore is only flexible in the sense that it lets ou shoot yourself int eh foot easily.

Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#48

Post by flatline3 »

dmytton wrote: post #34
vyrotek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope I never have to go back to modifying schemas again Honest question. Do you actually leverage the schemaless nature of MongoDB? Not 'worrying' about managing schemas is one thing, but actually leveraging the fact that your objects can have different fields is another. I have worked on projects that did need to store objects with different fields together but it seems to be a rare case. From what I've seen, mo…

Flexibility is useful in development. Once you deploy then things will change less frequently so the real benefit is when you do have to change something, you're not running a big ALTER statement.

> Once you deploy then things will change less frequently so the real benefit is when you do have to change something, you're not running a big ALTER statement.

Instead, you're writing a bunch of code to deal with data that may be in the old format, or may be in the new format, or may be in the new-new format.

I don't see that as an improvement.

Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#49

Post by davidw »

I had to use it a few years back, for some data reporting that had been added to a project after the fact, and... I found it to be awful, because the task was very much a join-heavy operation. Something that would have been a breeze with Postgres, or even Mysql got turned into this big, ugly, heavy, slow process. I was not impressed, especially since the quantity of data in the DB was also something that could have very, very easily been handled by a very conventional relational DB running on a VPS, to say nothing of dedicated hardware.

Basically, they had chosen MongoDB due to the 'cool/new' factor, and it came back to bite them on the ass.

Re: Does everyone hate MongoDB?

#50

Post by jeffdavis »

"Many suggest this default is a good way to get favourable benchmarks but there are no official ones so I don’t think that’s relevant."

Sure it is. People download MongoDB, run some simple workload against it, and see how fast it is. It's not an official benchmark, but it's still a strong part of the marketing message.

So, if those people don't understand the significance of sync/async, they may be getting a false impression of the speed.

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