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

I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

diegobasch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 194 posts

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#111

Post by lawn »

randallsquared wrote: post #106
jaggederest wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databases are not like the mail. Databases are like a bank. If I ask my bank why my account does not reflect my latest deposit and they say 'Sorry, I guess we didn't get it', I'm getting a new bank.

...and if you're building a banking app, that's relevant. If you're building a chat system, maybe things other than data integrity matter more.

Is it not relevant for a blog? Your business website? Your toy application? It is even relevant for a chat system!

And the flaw of your argument: Even if there are other more important things for an application, let's just make anything else than the #1 feature shit.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#112

Post by lmm »

daveungerer wrote: post #27

It's almost like the commenters who are bashing the author of the post did not read the bit in bold, which is his main point: If you tell a database to store something, and it doesn’t complain, you should safely assume that it was stored. This has nothing to do with the 2Gb limitation. Nowhere in the documentation does it mention that it will silently discard your data. What will happen with the 64-bit version if you…

>I know a lot of you may have cut your teeth on MySQL which, in its default configuration, will happily truncate your strings if they are bigger than a column. Guess what? Anyone serious about databases does not consider MySQL to be a proper database with those defaults. And with this, neither is MongoDB, though it may have its uses if you don't need to be absolutely certain that your data is stored.

Nice ad homien there. MongoDB isn't DB2, just as MySQL wasn't. Both can still be used to build very good products; in fact, I'd go so far as to say they lead to better products than "proper" databases.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#113

Post by alwold »

arielweisberg wrote: post #53

When I wrote some hobby code for Postgres using the PHP driver I had to manually check error codes after each and every operation. This came as no surprise to me. Exception throwing database drivers are a relatively new thing not an old thing. The only thing MongoDB does differently is that the writes are fire and forget in that the database hasn't returned a response of any kind when the function returns. In native…

Exception throwing is not that new. It's just a question of what is the style in the language you're using. In Java, for example, throwing exceptions has been the norm since JDBC was invented in 1997. PHP is definitely different in that exceptions are rare. Same story with C++. I'm not super experienced with Ruby, but they seem pretty common there, so I would've expected to get one.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#114

Post by zzzeek »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #70
linuxhansl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry. Which part of "It silently ignored my data" do you not understand? You call people "morons", yet it appears that you did not read the article yourself. Whether SQL or not, scalable or not, old or new, or whatever... Is completely immaterial here. When a database silently stops accepting data, and apparently has done so for 3 years, you have to at least admit that there are strange design goals at play. Now…

It's stated plainly and prominently in http://www.mongodb.org/downloads that 32-bit version is limited to 2GB. It's mentioned elsewhere in the documentation, but the OP didn't bother to read them. "A gem and two lines" and it worked, so he expected it to work forever. That's not how engineers usually work. Most of the time, they over-engineer, not the other way around! They research the hell out of any new technology…

I think they need to change the word "limit". This is what "limit" means:

    [root@li321-238 tmp]# dd if=/dev/zero of=./filesystem bs=1M count=128
    [root@li321-238 tmp]# mkfs.ext2 filesystem 
    [root@li321-238 tmp]# mount -o loop filesystem myfilesystem
    [root@li321-238 tmp]# dd if=/dev/zero of=myfilesystem/im_too_large bs=1M count=129
    dd: writing `myfilesystem/im_too_large': No space left on device
that is, a "limit" means, the program stops, complains. It's "limited".

A program that continues along without issue, only changing its behavior in some unannounced (documented or not) way, is not "limited". It's free as a bird.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#115

Post by lmm »

bdcravens wrote: post #37

There's a bigger question here. I get why diego was flabbergasted by the default, and I also hear legitimate claims that the documentation should have been read. But what I want to know is: Why are MongoDB advocates in such a bad mood? It's legit to criticize a language or a database. However, it seems to me that when MongoDB gets involved, the tone is far more aggressive and defensive. What's up with that? It's just…

I think you're way off base. Even assuming your claims about experience with traditional databases (which I disagree with), we don't see the same kind of emotional tone when talking about equally new datastores like redis or couchdb.

Mongodb was very aggressively marketed; its advocates produced benchmarks comparing it directly to traditional relational databases as though the use cases were the same. I think that set the tone for future discussion in a way that's still being felt.

If you're as old as your opinions suggest you'll remember the early days of Java were very similar - Sun marketing pushed it no end, and so tempers ran high and discussions were emotionally charged in a way that never happened when talking about perl or python or TCL.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#116

Post by SoftwareMaven »

manuscreationis wrote: post #69
bdcravens wrote: post #37

There's a bigger question here. I get why diego was flabbergasted by the default, and I also hear legitimate claims that the documentation should have been read. But what I want to know is: Why are MongoDB advocates in such a bad mood? It's legit to criticize a language or a database. However, it seems to me that when MongoDB gets involved, the tone is far more aggressive and defensive. What's up with that? It's just…

While I agree with the sentiment you're expressing here on some levels (people don't like it when you insult things they like, as they feel they need to defend their choice or themselves because of it), I don't think that quite applies here. This is a case where, although the ultimate complaint of the author is the behavior of the product (which is documented, but un-intuitive in nature unless you've read up on the i…

I don't think my GP was complaining about people saying the OP was wrong, but the vitriol associated with it. This article has prompted some of the ugliest comments I've seen on HN, even worse than Apple/Google crap articles.

Telling somebody they are wrong is one thing, calling them moronic or stupid is quite another.

I think this is an evolution of the language wars wherein immature[1] developers align themselves with a technology and mix up criticisms of the technology with criticisms of themselves. This seems to be part of the need humans have to be part of a community.

1. Immature in this context has nothing to do with age. Rather, it is an attitude that shows when any developer has not experienced and internalized enough technology to realize every single technology has fundamental problems, sucks in some way, yet is still usually pretty amazing nonetheless, especially within the context of its creation.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#117

Post by btown »

gaius wrote: post #101
ceejayoz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere in the documentation does it mention that it will silently discard your data. Demonstrably false. http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/getLastError+Command "MongoDB does not wait for a response by default when writing to the database. Use the getLastError command to ensure that operations have succeeded."

In the classic "MongoDB is Web Scale", it is recommended to use the "dev null" storage engine for this use case.

This is the famous video in which the benefits of the /dev/null storage engine are described in detail. Extremely enlightening!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#118

Post by jimbobimbo »

Adirael wrote: post #3

Just read the documentation and learn the APIs, this is what happens when you just copy and paste code from a tutorial.

To be fair, if tutorial is official, it could do a better job on educating about handling error conditions of the operation. Like it or not, but large amount of tutorial readers will do exactly that: copy and paste code without going into depths of what's going on there.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#119

Post by lmm »

smacktoward wrote: post #89
kombine wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second every word here. The version in the Ubuntu's repositories is not the latest(which is 2.2) and they can't be more explicit about it than pointing it out on the download page and giving a message upon the database startup.

The version in the Ubuntu's repositories is not the latest(which is 2.2) What does the author's complaint have to do with the version Ubuntu is distributing? Are the 32-bit limitations present in Ubuntu's version not present in the most recent version? If they are, than who cares which of them he installed? they can't be more explicit about it than pointing it out on the download page and giving a message upon the da…

>Uhh, yeah they can. On Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu you can make your .deb packages throw up dialogs that the user has to read and agree to before installation via debconf (http://www.fifi.org/cgi-bin/man2html/usr/share/man/man8/debc...). There's probably a way to do the same thing in RPM-based systems as well. If the warning is something that every user of the software needs to see, putting up a warning dialog and requiring the user to confirm having seen it before installation starts would probably be appropriate.

Right, but the only person with the ability to do that is the Ubuntu maintainer of the package. Mongodb has no control over what they do and should not be held responsible for their actions.

Re: I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

#120

Post by nestlequ1k »

eranation wrote: post #30

I'm using MongoDB for experimental work for about 6 months, it has a few amazing advantages, it's the MVP / POC king, you just do it, it's the agile iteration master, it's definitely not the best choice for doing any statistics, or any financial like transaction handling. However, it starts to feel like Anti MongoDB is just considered cool today, when I see someone that worked with MongoDB for a year, upgraded to 2.2…

Agreed. I've been using it almost daily for 2 years. It was not an instant learning curve (what DB is?), but it's an absolute joy to develop for.

People who would rather not bother, can stick with their tools, work slower, and be happy.

Post reply on HN