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Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

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Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#31

Post by monstrado »

francesca wrote: post #25
monstrado wrote: post #13

Most of the production deployments I find on the internet are around 3-5 nodes. Are there any production clusters that are running 500-600+ nodes?

Disney runs over 1400 instances according to this presentation: http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongosv-2011/a-year-with-... Also foursquare runs a very large MongoDB deployment. http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongodb-foursquare-cloud-... Craigslist: http://www.10gen.com/customers/craigslist Shutterfly also has a very large deployment: http://www.10gen.com/customers/shutterfly

1400 deployed instances doesn't necessarily equate to a 1400 node cluster. It seems to be very common for these companies to have several small to medium sized clusters...nevertheless, still pretty large deployments.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#32

Post by druiid »

jasonmccay wrote: post #23
druiid wrote: post #12

Whenever I see articles come up like this one mentioning MongoDB, I wonder not why people decided to go with Mongo, but why they didn't go with some of the alternatives out there? For my part, we use Couchbase to great success and it fixes many of the complaints against MongoDB. Then there's Riak and countless others with well established quality installations. To me MongoDB seems the buzzword NoSQL engine that gets…

So, if someone asked you why they should use "Riak and countless others" and not MongoDB, what would you really say? Also, you seemed to imply that Riak was a go-to solution (my wording) while implying that MongoDB was more of a fringe "buzzword" technology ... when, counting features, I think most would acknowledge MongoDB as being more mainstream. There are a large number of well-established and quality installatio…

I would say that (and I suppose this is a bit of a weasel words style answer) each is going to have their benefits and drawbacks and they would have to investigate each for their particular use-case to determine which would best work for them. I think it's pretty true though. I didn't mean to imply that Riak is a go-to solution at all. It was more to give a couple 'options' to explore if you were to start a list along with MongoDB.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#33

Post by emperorcezar »

aroman wrote: post #30
emperorcezar wrote: post #11

Oh look, another "We thought Mongo was a silver bullet and found out that was wrong" post.

Except, as others have said, that is not what this article is saying at all. That said, your comment seems to imply that you just read the headline, and (perhaps understandably) didn't actually read the article. I've learned, especially on HN, that article titles can be extremely misleading.

"Mongo tries to make certain things easier, and sometimes it succeeds, but in my experience these abstractions mostly leak. There is no panacea for your scaling problem. You still have to think about how to store your data so that you can get it out of the database. You still have to think about how to denormalize and how to index."

I read the article. That statement makes it sound very much like they thought Mongo would be silver bullet for that feature.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#34

Post by ry0ohki »

untog wrote: post #2

Genuine question- who is using MongoDB successfully in production, and at scale? I'm not aware of anyone myself- I hear of it being used in hackathons etc because its so quick to set up, but I'd be curious to know what people are using it with.

I run two sites, one is the perfect use-case for MongoDB - http://www.AUsedCar.com , it's a used car search engine. We've seen nothing but benefits by switching to it from MS SQL Server. Queries are way faster etc... It's a great use case because 99.9% of DB interactions are read-only searches.

My other site, http://www.BudgetSimple.com on the other hand is using SQL Server (in the process of porting to MySQL). It would not be a great use-case for Mongo, because there are usually as many update, delete, inserts as there are reads, and instant database integrity and a schema are important.

Anyone that claims a tool is perfect for every problem is probably wrong. You need to figure out the best one for your use case, and load test, security test, performance test, etc... until you have a good guess for the right answer.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#35

Post by druiid »

ddorian43 wrote: post #19
druiid wrote: post #12

Whenever I see articles come up like this one mentioning MongoDB, I wonder not why people decided to go with Mongo, but why they didn't go with some of the alternatives out there? For my part, we use Couchbase to great success and it fixes many of the complaints against MongoDB. Then there's Riak and countless others with well established quality installations. To me MongoDB seems the buzzword NoSQL engine that gets…

You can't currently change only a single field in couchbase (ex:increment this field) in neither couchbase nor riak. Range sharding (for saas,shard by client_id). No sorting by value on couchbase indexes? And many other small features. On the other hand i love about couchbase: no mongos,all servers equal.

Thanks, all good points.

I'm curious on the index sorting though, do you mean in terms of specifying what to sort on, or that you can't sort at all? As far as I understood the new indexing capabilities allow at the very least to sort on numeric values and similar.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#36

Post by ddorian43 »

druiid wrote: post #35
ddorian43 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't currently change only a single field in couchbase (ex:increment this field) in neither couchbase nor riak. Range sharding (for saas,shard by client_id). No sorting by value on couchbase indexes? And many other small features. On the other hand i love about couchbase: no mongos,all servers equal.

Thanks, all good points. I'm curious on the index sorting though, do you mean in terms of specifying what to sort on, or that you can't sort at all? As far as I understood the new indexing capabilities allow at the very least to sort on numeric values and similar.

You can't sort the results of a view by value:

http://www.couchbase.com/forums/thread/how-do-you-sort-resul...

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#37

Post by bobfunk »

untog wrote: post #2

Genuine question- who is using MongoDB successfully in production, and at scale? I'm not aware of anyone myself- I hear of it being used in hackathons etc because its so quick to set up, but I'd be curious to know what people are using it with.

We're using it for Webpop (http://www.webpop.com) and have generally been very happy with it.

We were very well aware of its characteristics when choosing our DB, and didn't go in expecting any magic Web Scale or somehow getting a HA setup with plenty of durability with just one server.

For a multitenant CMS where you want to store documents with custom schemas, need more than just a key/value store and want some capability to do ad-hoc queries against custom fields, MongoDB is a pretty good fit.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#38

Post by patrickod »

untog wrote: post #2

Genuine question- who is using MongoDB successfully in production, and at scale? I'm not aware of anyone myself- I hear of it being used in hackathons etc because its so quick to set up, but I'd be curious to know what people are using it with.

I'm sure the guys at MongoHQ.com would be able to provide you with better examples of "at-scale" setups.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#39

Post by kennystone »

untog wrote: post #2

Genuine question- who is using MongoDB successfully in production, and at scale? I'm not aware of anyone myself- I hear of it being used in hackathons etc because its so quick to set up, but I'd be curious to know what people are using it with.

foursquare pretty famously uses Mongo, and they handle a ton of data.

Re: Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

#40

Post by ddorian43 »

bobfunk wrote: post #37
untog wrote: post #2

Genuine question- who is using MongoDB successfully in production, and at scale? I'm not aware of anyone myself- I hear of it being used in hackathons etc because its so quick to set up, but I'd be curious to know what people are using it with.

We're using it for Webpop ( http://www.webpop.com ) and have generally been very happy with it. We were very well aware of its characteristics when choosing our DB, and didn't go in expecting any magic Web Scale or somehow getting a HA setup with plenty of durability with just one server. For a multitenant CMS where you want to store documents with custom schemas, need more than just a key/value store and want some c…

Are you using mongodb for the analytics and how do you store/index/query custom fields?
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