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Announcing MoSQL

stripe.com

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Re: Announcing MoSQL

#11

Post by rdouble »

dennis82 wrote: post #9
danielpal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At no-point. Stripe is doing it right. They are using the right tool for each job. Mongo for storage speed etc and then postgres to analyze query etc. This kind of comment shows how little knowledge you have about NoSQL and SQL. Is not a SQL vs NoSQL, it's about using the right technology for the job.

are you kidding me? There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company. Postgres is more than capable of sustaining the necessary speeds of a startup. Relational databases were created in the first place to solve these very problems around transactionality and analytics for finance. This library is a beautiful example of reinventing the wheel, and otherwise creating a pa…

Everywhere I've worked that did high volume transaction processing had an architecture that required a piece like this. Even if you use a relational database for intake, you still need to move the data to another database for analytics. Moving the data automatically via replication sounds a lot better than the typical batch process running at 4am.

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#12

Post by lucian1900 »

danielpal wrote: post #3
jabagonuts wrote: post #2

At what point do you abandon mongodb and just use postgresql?

At no-point. Stripe is doing it right. They are using the right tool for each job. Mongo for storage speed etc and then postgres to analyze query etc. This kind of comment shows how little knowledge you have about NoSQL and SQL. Is not a SQL vs NoSQL, it's about using the right technology for the job.

The only advantage MongoDB has over Postgres is built-in sharding, and even that is of dubious value.

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#13

Post by [deleted] »

physcab wrote: post #7

This is pretty cool but I'm struggling to see what the use cases are, atleast for analysis. There might be quite a bit of benefits for running application code that I'm not aware of. With regards to analysis though, their own example question is "what happened last night?" but then they go on to say that it is a near real-time data store. Does it matter that it is a real-time mirror then? I've always liked the paradi…

[deleted]

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#14

Post by e1ven »

Very neat project. I can see several use-cases for this where I work- It'd be nice to have alternatives means of searching through data.

I'd also like to mention a project I've been contributing to, Mongolike

[My fork is at https://github.com/e1ven/mongolike , once it's merged upstream, that version will be the preferred one ;) ]

It implements mongo-like structures on TOP of Postgres. This has allowed me to support both Mongo and Postgres for a project I'm working on.

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#15

Post by bradleyland »

physcab wrote: post #7

This is pretty cool but I'm struggling to see what the use cases are, atleast for analysis. There might be quite a bit of benefits for running application code that I'm not aware of. With regards to analysis though, their own example question is "what happened last night?" but then they go on to say that it is a near real-time data store. Does it matter that it is a real-time mirror then? I've always liked the paradi…

That's your preference, but I've not often found an occasion were someone (a client/stakeholder) said, "Yeah, go ahead and give that to me slower rather than faster." It just never seems to happen.

I'm thinking of this as something like polyglot memoization. Pretty cool when you think about it. Frequently need something that is slow in NoSQL, but fast in SQL? Memoize it to your SQL datastore. The alternative has always been to write it to two places. I kind of dig moving this out to the datastore to figure out.

I'm thinking that plenty of people will find this useful.

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#16

Post by nelhage »

physcab wrote: post #7

This is pretty cool but I'm struggling to see what the use cases are, atleast for analysis. There might be quite a bit of benefits for running application code that I'm not aware of. With regards to analysis though, their own example question is "what happened last night?" but then they go on to say that it is a near real-time data store. Does it matter that it is a real-time mirror then? I've always liked the paradi…

(I wrote MoSQL)

PostgreSQL scales surprisingly well for this purpose, and is much nicer for interactive queries than Hadoop/Hive. We use Impala[1] for some larger datasets, but Impala is comparatively new, and it's nice to have something as battle-tested as postgres here.

As for the "why do we need realtime?": In my mind the benefit of a near-realtime replica is not that you actually often need it, but that it means you never have to ask the question of "Was this snapshot refreshed recently enough?", and never end up having to wait several hours for an enormous dump/load operation, when you realize you did need newer data.

[1] http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2012/10/cloudera-impala-real-t...

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#17

Post by danso »

Out of curiousity, but what is the rest of Stripe's stack like? Ruby, apparently, but I'm assuming they don't use any kind of Mongo ORM at all.

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#18

Post by eksith »

danielpal wrote: post #3
jabagonuts wrote: post #2

At what point do you abandon mongodb and just use postgresql?

At no-point. Stripe is doing it right. They are using the right tool for each job. Mongo for storage speed etc and then postgres to analyze query etc. This kind of comment shows how little knowledge you have about NoSQL and SQL. Is not a SQL vs NoSQL, it's about using the right technology for the job.

>This kind of comment shows how little knowledge you have about NoSQL and SQL.

Try not to be condescending and your point will be better received. "Right technology" as I'm sure you're aware, has as much to do with subjectivity as appropriateness. Familiarity, workflow, ease of use (and did I mention familiarity?) cannot be overstated even when the perceived benefits are considered.

Read: religion.

Some of the people who rally against NoSQL may be deriding it from a knee jerk reaction, however others are simply frustrated with developers who, as Ted Dziuba would say, "value technological purity over gettin' shit done".

Re: Announcing MoSQL

#20

Post by gdb »

dennis82 wrote: post #9
danielpal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At no-point. Stripe is doing it right. They are using the right tool for each job. Mongo for storage speed etc and then postgres to analyze query etc. This kind of comment shows how little knowledge you have about NoSQL and SQL. Is not a SQL vs NoSQL, it's about using the right technology for the job.

are you kidding me? There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company. Postgres is more than capable of sustaining the necessary speeds of a startup. Relational databases were created in the first place to solve these very problems around transactionality and analytics for finance. This library is a beautiful example of reinventing the wheel, and otherwise creating a pa…

(I work at Stripe.)

Where we use MongoDB, it's not because of speed. PostgreSQL is certainly capable of fast performance. MongoDB is useful for its ability to log freeform data as well as for its replication model. (We use sharded MongoDB in a few places, but mostly use straight replica sets.)

We use MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Impala. They're all useful in different places.

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