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I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

diegobasch.com

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

#21

Post by gnufied »

meritt wrote: post #7
base698 wrote: post #6

I used MongoDB one afternoon, and guess what! It doesn't have table-locking writes?! :) In all seriousness, I built a 10 machine Mongo cluster, talked with a 10gen consultant a full day, went to Mongo meetup, and ran all sorts of benchmarks before ever using it in production. I still don't feel like I have the expertise to write a snarky blog post about it.

> It doesn't have table-locking writes?! :) Not really following the snark there. Are you trying to compare MongoDB to MySQL's MyISAM storage engine? Like there aren't numerous other extremely valid RDBMS solutions out there, which don't do table locks during a write? (MySQL InnoDB, Percona, Maria, Aria, Postgresql, Firebird, etc...)

No. He is saying out of all faults Mongo has - blog author picks the one which is rather well known.

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

#22

Post by dmaz »

lbcadden3 wrote: post #9
diego wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it was hidden deeply in the documentation. It's like making a car that has the gas and brake pedals switched, and then blaming accidents on people not reading section 5 of the owner's manual. I'm hardly an inexperienced programmer. I've used Cassandra, SimpleDB, Voldemort, etc. I wrote part of the Inktomi Search Engine in the 90s, and plenty of (what today would be called) NoSQL stores over the years. A d…

It's on the download page. http://www.mongodb.org/downloads

It also prints to the log upon starting a 32-bit server.

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

#23

Post by DanWaterworth »

andrewvc wrote: post #16

I'm a pretty big detractor of mongo, but I don't agree with this post. One of mongo's main design decisions is to defer writes, making this sort of thing possible. I think it's a crappy tradeoff but it is one of the things that makes mongodb mongodb. If you use it without knowing this you haven't researched it well.

When is this behaviour useful? (Benchmarks don't count)

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

#24

Post by phlyingpenguin »

diego wrote: post #5
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.

This type of attitude is not constructive. Of course I read the documentation. Much more than "copy and paste from the tutorial." I looked at tons of code samples as needed, read blog posts, etc. The limitation wasn't obvious at all. This reminds me of the attitude that I had to correct in developers that worked for me: - There is a huge difference between "it works" and "it does what the user expects in a friendly w…

Are you really arguing that you shouldn't have to study documentation? First, blog posts and code samples are not documentation (in this case, at least).

If you were working for me as a developer and had the attitude that you shouldn't have to _thoroughly_ read the manual and notes for something like MongoDB, I'd let you go. Steve Jobs was not a programmer.

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

#25

Post by achy »

diego wrote: post #4
ceejayoz wrote: post #2

Not reading the documentation (or hell, the red "note" text under each 32 bit download link at http://www.mongodb.org/downloads ) for basic limitations will bite you in the ass in 2022 just as easily as it will in 2012.

Except that it was hidden deeply in the documentation. It's like making a car that has the gas and brake pedals switched, and then blaming accidents on people not reading section 5 of the owner's manual. I'm hardly an inexperienced programmer. I've used Cassandra, SimpleDB, Voldemort, etc. I wrote part of the Inktomi Search Engine in the 90s, and plenty of (what today would be called) NoSQL stores over the years. A d…

Even your own blog posts says that you basically just followed the getting started guide for ruby. Personally, I would not use an untested, brand new to me, technology on anything that 'had to work'. And if this wasn't that important, then chalk it up to a learning experience. MongoDB's decisions might not fit your personal style, but your attitude towards learning is a poor model for technology.

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

#26

Post by mtkd »

This is the latest in a long line of negative posts on MongoDB based solely on first impressions because either:

1) it does not behave exactly like SQL

2) the user didn't read any more than a Quickstart Guide

3) the user fundamentally misunderstands the aim of the new technology or the application it is intended for

Ember.js suffers from the same ignorance.

What makes it worse is all the morons who upvote without even reading the detail purely because the title reinforces some misconceived bias they already have.

'NoSQL' is part of the problem. This technology has absolutely no comparison with SQL other than it persists data.

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

#27

Post by daveungerer »

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 run out of disk space, more silently discarded data?

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.

EDIT: Thanks for pointing out getLastError. My point still stands, since guaranteed persistence is optional rather than the default. In fact, reading more of the docs points out that some drivers can call getLastError by default to ensure persistence. That means that MongoDB + Driver X can be considered a database, but not MongoDB on its own.

I'm just struggling to imagine being willing to lose some amount of data purely for the sake of performance, so philosophically it's not a database unless you force it to be. Much like MySQL.

EDIT2: Not trying to be snarky here, but I would love to hear about datasets people have where missing random data would not be an issue. I'm serious, just want to know what the use case is that MongoDB's default behaviour was designed for.

EDIT3: (Seriously) I'm sure MongoDB works splendidly when you setup your driver to ensure that a certain numbers of servers will confirm receipt of the data (if your driver supports such an option), nowhere am I disputing that. But that number really should have a lower bound of 1, enforced by MongoDB itself. And to the guy who called me stupid: you are what's wrong with HN.

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

#28

Post by jeremiep »

diego wrote: post #5
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.

This type of attitude is not constructive. Of course I read the documentation. Much more than "copy and paste from the tutorial." I looked at tons of code samples as needed, read blog posts, etc. The limitation wasn't obvious at all. This reminds me of the attitude that I had to correct in developers that worked for me: - There is a huge difference between "it works" and "it does what the user expects in a friendly w…

You're comparing something like an iPhone, intended for the average Joe, to a complex system intended for developers and especially data architects. Assuming software to be intuitive is a good sign of a bad programmer in my book; any good engineer would never assume anything.

Heck, I learned about error handling in Mongo the first hour I started learning it. Same for the 2Gb limitation of 32-bit. The mongo manual is very well done and also happens to be fully indexed in Google.

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

#29

Post by deelowe »

diego wrote: post #14
lbcadden3 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on the download page. http://www.mongodb.org/downloads

I installed it through Ubuntu (apt-get). Most people must (or should) be installing MongoDB through a package manager. Once again, assuming that people will see the warning because it's on the download page is shortsighted.

See dmaz's comment about the log files. I'm a complete mongodb noob as well, but found out pretty quickly that there's a 2GB limit on 32bit systems. It really is hard to miss.

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

#30

Post by eranation »

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, knows it inside out and still hates it, I would listen, and start to worry. but until then, I'm going to keep using it, and saving time.

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