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Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

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Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#31

Post by cwyers »

giaour wrote: post #26
TheHippo wrote: post #11

Or: You could just RTFM and avoid all these issues. For example: The message warning you that 32bit builds are not safe for storing more than 2GB of data is larger than the download button itself. If don't see this, you should probably be not in charge of storing any data anyways. Many other issues have been resolved with the 3.0 release or are documented very clearly.

The author is cataloguing some of Mongo's "paper cuts," i.e., issues for which warnings and known workarounds exist but that really make the development experience less pleasant. For MongoDB's actual limitations, read aphyr's Call Me Maybe series.

Right. I am so sick and tired of MongoDB defenders saying "read the manual" after aphyr has found multiple faults in MongoDB that directly conflict with the documentation.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#32

Post by jfb »

TheHippo wrote: post #11

Or: You could just RTFM and avoid all these issues. For example: The message warning you that 32bit builds are not safe for storing more than 2GB of data is larger than the download button itself. If don't see this, you should probably be not in charge of storing any data anyways. Many other issues have been resolved with the 3.0 release or are documented very clearly.

A database built by people who are careless with my data is not a database worth paying attention to, even when particular problems are remedied.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#33

Post by bpicolo »

imaginenore wrote: post #14
fiatjaf wrote: post #9

I think people only use it because it stores JSON and let's you query it arbitrarily on demand. It appears to be as good as CouchDB, but with on-demand queries, as good as Postgres, but with JSON (!). It appears to be quick and easy and the tool for the job. Also, when people say NoSQL they actually mean MongoDB.

> Also, when people say NoSQL they actually mean MongoDB That's just not true. There are tons of NoSQL solutions that are well known. Redis.

In fact it's quite literally the opposite of true.

Edit: In the sense that there are many, many well-regarded and used NoSql databases.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#34

Post by arthurcolle »

lemevi wrote: post #5
arthurcolle wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your data really doesnt matter you might as well just use ElasticSearch as a document store, its a lot easier anyways

I doubt ElasticSearch is easier to set up and get started with than MongoDB, especially if you're coming from limited knowledge about either.

ElasticSearch takes less than 5 minutes to set up, and you literally just perform HTTP requests against it. In my opinion it is much easier than setting up MongoDB.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#35

Post by cheald »

joepie91_ wrote: post #20
TheHippo wrote: post #11

Or: You could just RTFM and avoid all these issues. For example: The message warning you that 32bit builds are not safe for storing more than 2GB of data is larger than the download button itself. If don't see this, you should probably be not in charge of storing any data anyways. Many other issues have been resolved with the 3.0 release or are documented very clearly.

1. There was no such warning for a long, long time. 2. It's a dumb limitation, and an architectural issue as far as I'm concerned. 3. It still doesn't justify silently throwing away data for years. 4. Many of the points on my list remain unaddressed, and likely never will be addressed. EDIT: Additionally, the typical system administrator doesn't install MongoDB from the 'Downloads' page, but uses a package manager, a…

That 32bit startup warning has been in place since 2009. It was in the README in 2008 (IIRC, pre-1.0).

https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/commit/b3322b86a014683018ac...

There's plenty in Mongo to complain about, but grousing about the 32-bit limitation just makes you look like you're bad at reading introductory documentation.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#36

Post by toyg »

I've used MongoDB recently for the first time, for an internal project. Being schemaless, I believe it did speed up development time significantly, and allowed me to add stuff more gradually, but you could say that's just a way to indulge a certain laziness of design. Now that the project has matured, stepping back I can see how a relational database would be a better fit, but if I had used a rdbms from the beginning I might have not "shipped" quite as quickly. Swapping it out for a real rdbms will mean changing a couple of classes anyway, nothing dramatic.

So uhm, I don't agree that it's not good for prototyping; if your final code ends up having a decent abstraction level, it should not matter what you picked on day 1 anyway.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#37

Post by cwyers »

_pdp_ wrote: post #6

I, well, one my companies, have been using mongo for a while without any problems. I cannot comment about is reliability but as a business tool, in the niche area we operate, it served us well. I've got nothing against relation databases but there are not a solution to every single problem. Heck, why not decide first if you can use flat files? Do you really need to query and join. Not all problems require that sort o…

If you don't need to QUERY, just use a file system.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#39

Post by nailer »

Relationships in MongoDB are commonly stored as ObjectID references, and (at least on node) the default Mongo client (Mongoose) makes you write schemas to enforce these.

I think Mongo is awful too, and I'm sure there are problems with this approach - I'd love for someone with more DB knowledge to go into details - but saying there are 'no relations' seems to be an oversimplification.

Re: Never, ever, ever use MongoDB

#40

Post by nailer »

lemevi wrote: post #4

How would one use Meteor.js without MongoDB though? Are you saying not to use Meteor.js too? I was thinking about maybe toying with the idea of making a fully reactive RethinkDB package for Meteor.js.

There's a mongodb JS API driver that talks to Postgres IIRC. Postgres 'json' data type is also apparently faster than Mongo. Anyone played with it?
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