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Don't use MongoDB

• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• aritraghosh007 15y ago
  Is this actually true ? Someone from 10gen needs to confirm and accept it ,if they are.
  • buster 15y ago
    As if they would officially confirm this...
    • aritraghosh007 15y ago
      Confirm or refute , doesn't matter but at least a comment giving some strong evidence would surely work !!
      • exDM69 15y ago
        As the author made no specific claims or didn't show any failing test cases which can be discussed and reasoned about in a sensible way, it's going to be very hard to confirm or refute anything. Responding to anonymous flames in the internet is a waste of time.
        • aritraghosh007 15y ago
          After reading most of the comments now , I believe it is. I cant understand why would people just try to bring down something which is popular by all means by doing such rash publicity . HN should be a little careful while posting such links without verifying the source.
• ricardobeat 15y ago
  10gen's order seems to be, #5, then everything else in some order. #1 ain't in the top 3. So, #5, #1, then the other 3 in some order :)
• brainless 15y ago
  Is there someone here in HN who has used MongoDB with large data sets, high concurrency application? Can someone else share some light? And maybe a more recent version of MongoDB...
  • rbanffy 15y ago
    There is a team in the company I work for who has deployed Mongo to production, with, I suppose, a heavy load. I can check with them. I heard no complains, but the company is large enough for me not to hear everything.
• antimora 15y ago
  I was planning adopt MongoDB for my big project and this post puts some doubts. Is this true? Could anyone confirm or deny this?
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    • buff-a 15y ago
      It works on my machine!
      • chrissanz 15y ago
        A lot of trolling here, I've never had any issues of missing data. When claiming a db (as big and popular as mongodb) doesn't work, you should include references, company, examples on how to reproduce, etc. Enough said: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments
        • fredoliveira 15y ago
          Just as you claim that people who have had problems are trolling, so could be said about your own claim. These people are basing their opinion on their own (negative) experience, while you are doing the same based on your own (positive) experience. How is that any different? This thread includes numerous examples of people who did indeed have grave issues with Mongo. They're not any less valid that your own example (or the ones you link to). In these topics there's always going to be positive and negative takes, but calling people trolls because - again, like you -they voice their opinion is harsh.
          • latch 15y ago
            Are the two really equal? Given two independent sources that you don't really know: a) I've never lost data with MongoDB, b) It wiped my database Doesn't (b) have a certain burden of proof? Maybe he had a bug in his code? Maybe he did something weird with his server? Maybe he didn't follow upgrade directions properly? Maybe he got hacked? Is it really too much to ask for something verifiable? Steps to reproduce? Log files? Assuming that the person isn't just malicious, even a before and after of db.xx.count()?
• chx 15y ago
  This rant is completely outdated and it shows: "pre transaction log" "fixed this in 1.8". You realize MongoDB is at 2.0 now and the transaction log was introduced in 1.8, right? Yes, MongoDB had problems but since the transaction log it's pretty good. I have used MongoDB since early 1.3 and I knew what I was doing and we never lost a bit of data. There is a tradeoff -- while MongoDB handled write load easily that a MySQL box with 2-3 times the RAM , I/O capability couldn't at all we understood the bleeding edge of using MongoDB back then. We have, for example, kept a snapshot slave which shot itself down often, took an LVM snapshot then continued replicating. Never needed those. We have meticulously kept a QA server pair around and the only time when I have ran into a data loss problem was when I have hosed one of those -- but only one and even the QA department could continue (and hosing that server was me not knowing that Redhat 5 had separate e4fsprogs and e2fsprogs, only partially MongoDB fault but now it works without O_DIRECT so even this would not be a problem any more) . Never understood for example how could foursquare get where they got to -- didnt they have a QA copy similarly?
  • dextorious 15y ago
    ""This rant is completely outdated and it shows: "pre transaction log" "fixed this in 1.8". You realize MongoDB is at 2.0 now and the transaction log was introduced in 1.8, right?"" You do realize that 1.8 vs 2.0 is not eons ago, but just a few months, right? And you do realize that the cavalier-throw-all-caution-to-the-wind development attitude that cause all this problems can and does continue to exist? You don't eliminate that just because you added a transaction log (as late as in 1.6, IIRC). Also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3200683 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3200683
  • nmongo 15y ago
    I SUBMITTED THIS STORY AND IT IS IN FACT A HOAX!
• jtchang 15y ago
  I have never used MongoDB in production but have thought about it. To me though it is just another architectural decision that you need to base around risk and reward. MongoDB is awesome at certain things. But it is still not at a tried and true level as say PostgreSQL or MySQL. I am skeptical of the article but only because it is all too easy to fault new projects. However I would be curious to know 10gen's development practices as compared to say Postgres or SQLite (I have heard awesome things about SQLite's development testing).
• electic 15y ago
  We extensively tested this inside Viralheat with a write heavy load of over 30,000 writes per second and basically it failed our test. It is not robust for the analytics world is the conclusion we came to. Though, I hope it gets better one day...it has potential.
  • jdagostino 15y ago
    what did you end up going with?
    • electic 15y ago
      Our company is a big data company. So our amazing engineers are responsible for storing hundreds of millions of pieces of data per week AND also crunching and analyzing that data. So basically we need a system where we can have incredible write and read performance but also a system that is elastic in nature. Most importantly, it has to be available. Before I go into more details, MongoDB is great for most people who don't have a high transaction volume. It is easy to setup and easy to use. So if you are in this camp, MongoDB is probably a good fit for you. We did about two months worth of extensive tests in our lab. Basically two things didn't bode well for us. One, the locking killed reading...we just had a hard time keeping the flow of writes and the flow of data to our statistics cluster alive. Yea, you could use replication but that too didn't work too well performance wise. Two, the sharding didn't seem that robust. As the cluster got bigger and bigger, we started noticing the overhead of keeping it up was getting to be too great. Rather than write in detail, I think this article covers some of the scaling issues we experienced: http://blog.schmichael.com/2011/11/05/failing-with-mongodb/ http://blog.schmichael.com/2011/11/05/failing-with-mongodb/ We finally used a hybrid system. We went with Membase, now CouchBase, to handle immediate storage and we are now implementing Hadoop for our long term storage needs. P.S. Our entire stack is a KV in nature.
      • Goldcap 15y ago
        Just reading about your transactional volume, it seems like at it's face MongoDB wouldn't be a good fit for this project. 30k per second is not anywhere MongoDB pretends to live, I think by their own admission. And Sharding in MongoDB, while being called a core feature, was bolted on after core development, probably intended to give Mongo some credibility with those who want it to be more scalable. IMHO if you need that kind of scalability, you're already straying from the Mongo Niche, 2.0.0 notwithstanding. So agreeing with a point earlier, if you don't like a write lock implementation, and have concerns about scaling, and have a huge transactional volume, just really not something that fits well with MongoDB. I've been using Mongo now (currently using 1.8) for three (is it almost three now?) years, 2 million hits/day, with a replicated set, and while I've needed maintenance, reindexing, and (gasp) restarts on occasion, never had any of the problems identified by the author of this post. Bottom line, sounds to me like someone was in over someone's head from an architectural standpoint, made a bad choice of MongoDB, and then blamed 10gen for his own lack of foresight. So while I empathize with the struggle, I fault him for not knowing his options in advance, TESTING first, then betting the farm on a fairly new opensource codebase. LOTS of other database solutions that would scale better. Analyzing lots and lots of transactional stateless data with MongoDB map-reduce? Well, just kinda like killing yourself by trying to sprint up from the bottom of the Grand Canyon. "You really tried to do that?"
• openmosix 15y ago
  Well, I worked in Vodafone (and Nokia) in very large (laaarge) projects, serving ~50 milions users. Years ago, no hope for NoSQL, we used MySQL. We hit at least 10/20 bugs, solved by 'hotpatch' from Sun. So? I think as developers we should get used to bugs and patches. Should I write a post "don't use MySQL?". We also hit several bugs in the generational garbage collector. Stop using Java? I don't feel the drama here.
  • enneff 15y ago
    > Should I write a post "don't use MySQL?" There have been plenty.
    • mechanical_fish 15y ago
      I assure you that, back when MySQL was the same age as Mongo is today, "don't use MySQL" was conventional wisdom... among those who could find and afford Oracle DBAs. ;) (Though there weren't a lot of blog posts about it, because the word blog had not been invented yet; blogs developed along with... MySQL.) It will be interesting to watch Mongo as it matures over the next ten years. Unlike MySQL, it is competing against ubiquitously-deployed, well-known, well-worn open-source RDBMS packages, so its history is unlikely to unfold in the same way that MySQL's did.
      • einhverfr 15y ago
        "Don't Use MySQL" still should be conventional wisdom. Indeed it's the only database system I have ever used where a system with a single transaction running only multi-row inserts into a table can (and frequently does) deadlock against itself. Don't get me wrong, time was when it was easier to use than PostgreSQL but that time is long since passed. One area I have continued to recommend MySQL has been in areas of content management but to be honest in many of these areas, NoSQL is actually a better fit.
        • tptacek 15y ago
          Given the size and success of MySQL deployments, it's getting awfully hard to evangelize that particular religion. I prefer Postgres, but life is too short to argue about it.
• blago 15y ago
  Sounds painfully familiar...
• latch 15y ago
  There's a lot of anonymity going on here. A new HN account, an unknown company and product, and claims with no evidence. Why are't links to 10gen's Jira provided? Where's the test code that shows the problems they had with the write lock? This is an extremely shallow analysis.
  • angelbob 15y ago
    And yet he makes some good points. Pretty much all of this is verifiable. I don't agree with a lot of his conclusions, but mostly his data is correct.
    • latch 15y ago
      Look, I'm not the best person to do this..but...good points? 1 - Default writes are unsafe by default: MongoDB supports a number of "write concerns": * fire-and-forget or "unsafe" * safe mode (only written to memory, but the data is checked for "correctness", like unique constraint violations) * journal commit * data-file commit * replicate to N nodes The last 4 can be mixed and matched. Most (all?) drivers allow this to be specified on a per-write basis. It's an incredible amount of flexibility. I don't know of any other store that lets you do that. When a user registers, we do a journal commit ({j:true}), 'cuz you don't want to mess that up. When a user submits a score, we do a fire-and-forget, because, if we lose a few scores during the 100ms period between journal commit, it isn't the end of the world (for us, if it is for you, always use j:true) The complaint is the default-behavior (which I think you can globally configure in most drivers) of the driver? Issue a pull request. Is the default table created in MySQL still MyISAM ? 2 and 6 - Lost Data This is the most damning point. But what can I say? "No?" My word versus his? I haven't seen those issues in production, I hang out in their google groups and I don't recall seeing anyone bring that up - though I do tend to avoid anything complicated/serious and let the 10gens guys handle that. Maybe they did something wrong? Maybe they were running a development release? Maybe they did hit a really nasty MongoDB bug. 3 - Global Lock MongoDB works best if your working set fits in memory. That should simply be an operation goal. Beyond that, three points. First, the global lock will yield, i believe (someone more informed can verify this). Second, the story gets better with every version and it's clearly high on 10gen's list. Most importantly though, it's a constraint of the system. All systems have constraints. You need to test it out for your use-case. For a lot of people, the global lock isn't an issue, and MongoDB's performance tends to be higher than a lot of other systems. Yes it's a fact, but with respect to "don't use MongoDB", its FUD. It's an implementation detail, that you should be aware of, but it's the impact of that implementation details, if any, that we should be talking about. 3 and 4 - Sharding Sharding is easy, rebalancing shards is hard. Sharding is something else which got better in 1.8 and 2.0, which the author thinks we ought to simply dismiss. I don't have enough experience with MongoDB shard management to comment more. I think the foursquare outage is somewhat relevant though (again, keeping in mind that things have improved a lot since then). 7 - "Things were shipped that should have never been shipped" This is a good verifiable point? I remember using MySQL cluster when it first shipped. That was a disaster. I also remember using MySQL from a .NET project and opened up a good 3-4 separate bugs about concurrency issues where you could easily deadlock a thread trying to pull a connection from the connection pool. I once had to use use clearcase. Talk about something that shouldn't have shipped. This is essentially an attack on 10gen, that ISN'T verifiable. Again, it's his anonymous word versus no ones. Just talking about it is giving it unjust attention. 8 - Replication It's unclear if this is replica sets or the older master-slave replication. Either way, again, I don't think this is verifiable. In fact, I can say that, relatively speaking, I see very few replica set questions in the groups. It works for me, but I have a very small data set, my data pieces themselves are small. Obviously some people are managing just fine (I'm not going to go through their who's who, I think we all know some of the big MongoDB installations). 9 - The "real" problem We've all seen some pretty horrible things. I was using MySQL in 5.0 and there was some amazing bugs. There's a bug, which I think still exists, where SQL Server can return you the incorrect inserted id (no, not using @@identify, using scope_identity) when you use a multi-core system. MS spent years trying to fix it. I guess I can say what 10gen never could...If you were using MongoDB prior to 1.8 on a single server, it's your own fault if you lost data. To me, replication as a means to provide durability never seemed crazy. It just means that you have to understand what's going on. Look, I don't doubt that this guy really ran into problems. I just think they have a large data set with a heavy workload, they thought MongoDB was a silver bullet, and rather than being accountable for not doing proper testing, they want to try and burn 10gen. They didn't act responsibly, and now they aren't being accountable.
• rshm 15y ago
  Not sure how MongoDB deals with writes in recent versions. It used to leave everything blindly in control of mmap implementation of OS.
• benatkin 15y ago
  I feel a kind of social responsibility to flag this anonymous FUD.
• davyjones 15y ago
  I would love to see a thorough approach in which such claims are actually shown and can be reproduced. This helps everyone immensely...from 10gen to people looking to adopt.
• belbn 15y ago
  Can we make Google's filesystem mainstream?
  • SeanNieuwoudt 15y ago
    there is an open source alternative: http://hbase.apache.org/ http://hbase.apache.org/
• donpark 15y ago
  Burden of proof is on 10gen, not frustrated customers. This post is believable enough for me to avoid using MongoDB for write-heavy apps.
  • libria 15y ago
    What if it's not a frustrated customer but a libelous, frustrated competitor instead?
    • donpark 15y ago
      In most case, I think 10gen will be able to dispute false claims. With regard to nomongo's post, 10gen can check their record and say whether they did or didn't have a customer with premium support account with similar use case and issues. 10gen can also counter such complaints with testimonials from customers with similar use cases. But note that nomongo's post is not about individual issues but about his concern that 10gen's priorities are misplaced which he should have wrote first instead of last. Rest was just about how his concern came about. Current status of technical issues he experienced are irrelevant to his concern.
    • peteforde 15y ago
      Except that those are not the words on a libelous, frustrated competitor. I've seen these claims validated over and over again both by posts on HN but also people I trust that have worked with MongoDB under load. Performance benchmarks stop being meaningful when you realize that you can't fix the problem you're having without committing to a system-wide shutdown of unknown duration. The main point that the author makes is that the creators of MongoDB do not follow rigourous practices. If this doesn't bother you, please go right ahead and use anything you wish. I hear that /dev/null is really zippy these days.
    • bborud 15y ago
      Does it matter? As a user of MongoDB and Cassandra I am very interested in the sort of discussion that comes out of such postings.
  • nmongo 15y ago
• antirez 15y ago
  I appreciate the "public service" intend of this blog post, however: 1) It is wrong to evaluate a system for bugs now fixed (but you can evaluate a software development process this way, however it is not the same as MongoDB itself, since the latter got fixed). 2) A few of the problems claimed are hard to verify, like subsystems crashing, but users can verify or deny this just looking at the mailing list if MongoDB has a mailing list like the Redis one that is ran by an external company (google) and people outside 10 gen have the ability to moderate messages. (For instance in Redis two guys from Citrusbytes can look/moderate messages, so even if I and Pieter would like to remove a message that is bad advertising we can't in a deterministic way). 3) New systems fails, especially if they are developed in the current NoSQL arena that is of course also full of interests about winning users ASAP (in other words to push new features fast is so important that perhaps sometimes stability will suffer). I can see this myself as even if my group at VMware is very focused on telling me to ship Redis as stable as possible as first rule, sometimes I get pressures about releasing new stuff ASAP from the user base itself. IMHO it is a good idea if programmers learn to test very well the systems they are going to use with simulations for the intended use case. Never listen to the Hype, nor to detractors. On the other side all this stories keep me motivated in being conservative in the development of Redis and try avoiding bloats and things I think will ultimately suck in the context of Redis (like VM and diskstore, two projects I abandoned).
  • gfodor 15y ago
    At the end of the post the author notes his concern isn't with the technical bugs per se, but with the deep rooted cultural problems and misplaced priorities the existence of those problems reveal.
    • antirez 15y ago
      That's a fair problem, but I think It is true for other products as well and was true for things that we feel very solid today like MySQL. In other words there is a tention between stability and speed of development, a very "hard" tention indeed. It is up to the developers culture and sensibility to balance the two ingredients in the best way. One of the reasons I don't want to create a company around Redis, but want to stay with VMware forever as an employee developing Redis, is that I don't want development pressures that are not drive by: users, technical arguments. So that I can balance speed of development and stability as I (and the other developers) feel right. Without direct reference to 10gen I guess this is harder when there is a product-focused company around the product (but I don't know how true this is for 10gen as I don't follow very closely the development and behavior of other NoSQL products).
• christkv 15y ago
  A story from a newly created account by a person nobody can verify is real and asking other people to submit his rant (to gain what? credibility to his story?) nomoremongo 4 hours ago | link I'd appreciate if someone would submit this story for me. http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=FD3xe6Jt http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=FD3xe6Jt What's up with the trolling here. Who are you and what company do you work for that has had all those problems you mentioned ?
  • slowpoke 15y ago
    Attacking the messenger is shallow. How about you look at the points - whether valid or not - he or she raises instead and try to refute them? It matters little if that person is well known or someone entirely new. I don't see how the relative anonymity of a person is in any way related to his or her credibility. Besides, calling a position you don't agree with "trolling" with no further argumentation is 4chan level of discourse, and I know what I'm talking about when I say this. I will not take a side in this discussion because I'm not qualified to voice an opinion over things I do not understand well enough (databases), but I had to point this out.
    • christkv 15y ago
      it's still a valid point as there are no references to back up any off the claims in the post. he should at least have included links to issues in their jira or some way of replicating the problem he is experiencing. as it stands now it's not fact based and could as much be opinion as there is no way to weight the merit of the claims against anything substantial :(
      • slowpoke 15y ago
        Now that's more of a valid argument. I just dislike calling anyone who prefers to stay in relative anonymity (for whatever reason) or is simply new to a community "not credible", at least if it's only because of those attributes. It's a thinly veiled ad hominem.
  • nmongo 15y ago
• jonpaul 15y ago
  I've used MongoDB in production since the 1.4 days. It should be noted that my apps are NOT write heavy. But, many of the author's points can be refuted by using version 2.0. Regarding the point of using getLastError(), the author is completely correct. But the problem is not so much that MongoDB isn't good, it's that developers start using it and expect it to behave like a relational DB. Start thinking in an asynchronous programming paradigm, and you'll have less problems. I got bit my MongoDB early on. When my server crashed, I learned real quickly what fsync, journaling, and friends can do. The best thing a dev can do before using MongoDB is to RTFM and understand its implications. The #1 reason that I used MongoDB, was because of the schema-less models. That's it. Early on in an applications life-cycle, the data model changes so frequently that I find migrations painful and unnecessary. My two cents, hopefully it helps.
  • CarlHoerberg 15y ago
    Schema-less is imho a overrated feature. ORMs like DataMapper (Ruby) and NHibernate (.NET) can generate the schema on the fly for RMDBS, so no need for migrations pre-production. But when your application is in production you need migrations even with a "schema-less" db! See, rename a field and "all your data" is lost, unless you migrate the data from the old field to the new one..
    • vidarh 15y ago
      "Schema-less" has the potential (if you use it properly) advantage of allowing gradual migration. As long as your code can handle all versions of objects in current use, you can deploy new code, then either migrate objects as they're updated/rewritten, and/or slowly migrate objects in the background. For certain types of schema changes in large enough data stores, this can be a killer feature. I remember one RDBMS setup I had to deal with where we were "stuck" having to do a lot of suboptimal schema changes because the changes we actually wanted to do resulted (based on tests in our dev environment) the system to slow to a crawl where it was unusable for 8+ hours and we just couldn't afford that kind of downtime. We spent a lot of engineering time working our way around something that'd simply be a non-issue in a schema-less system.
• woodhull 15y ago
  I couldn't agree more with this analysis, with the added addition that the single threaded nature of the JS interpreter can also cause really bad & unexpected performance things to happen. Most of the people who are excited about mongo, have never used it in a high volume environment, or with a large dataset. We used it for a medium sized app at my last employer, with paid support from 10gen, and everyone on the project walked away wishing we had stayed with a more mature data store. Of course things work well when traffic is low, everything fits in memory, and there are no shards.
• ericflo 15y ago
  But it does 8,000,000 operations per second! http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/2010/05/05/with-a-name-like-mongo-it-has-to-be-good/ http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/2010/05/05/with-a-nam... (Sorry, possibly excessive snark. That said, I think that blog post is a good example of one of this pastebin author's points: at least historically, benchmark numbers have been a big focus for Mongo developers.)
  • j_baker 15y ago
    According to the link, that's 320k operations per server, which means that it handles 8 million operations per second with 25 servers. I don't think it's a stretch to say that any database that has 25 servers should be able to handle at least 8 million operations a second.
• mtkd 15y ago
  Anyone using Mongo currently has to be aware there are likely to be some teething issues as it is very new technology. I haven't used it in production (yet), but I would have no fear of using it today. I would run regular consistency monitoring and validation around critical data just like I do with our SQL databases. I'm willing to take my part of the pain and inconvenience in making technology like this stable. You could have written this about any adolescent SQL server BITD. All the tools you use today had to go through this process. For me Mongo is awesome and getting more awesome. Mongo and technology like it is the reason I still get excited about writing new apps.
  • nmongo 15y ago
    I SUBMITTED THIS STORY AND IT IS IN FACT A HOAX!
• chrissanz 15y ago
  This article should be banned for lack of references and examples. For those of you looking to learn mongodb check this out http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments
• foobarbazetc 15y ago
  No shit, nmongo. Anyone with half a brain can go look at the MongoDB codebase and deduce that it's amateur hour. It's start up quality code but it's supposed to keep your data safe. That's pretty much the issue here -- "cultural problems" is just another way of saying the same thing. Compare the code base of something like PostgreSQL to Mongo, and you'll see how a real database should be coded. Even MySQL looks like it's written by the world's best programmers compared to Mongo. I'm not trying to hate on Mongo or their programmers here, but you've basically paid the price for falling for HN hype. Most RDBMSes have been around for 10+ years, so it's going to take a long, long time for Mongo to catch up in quality. But it won't, because once you start removing the write lock and all the other easy wins, you're going to hit the same problems that people solved 30 years ago, and your request rates are going to fall to memory/spindle speed. Nothing's free.
  • christkv 15y ago
    I think the discussion here also misses an important aspect of the conversation which is about application data modeling. Mongo will sooner or later reach a "stable" level as it matures just as mysql, postgres and all other datastores have done. I picked mongo due to the good fit it had to the problems I needed solved not only from the server perspective but from the modeling perspective. The ease of ad-hoc queries and the schemaless nature of the db lent itself well to the kind of problems I wanted to solve. So even if in 30 years it's got the same characteristics as our current dominant data storage models I consider it a net win that I will be able to use a document oriented database for development over a more traditional RDBMS for some off my applications. The richer our toolset is the better we are off as not every problems is a nail to be hammered in with an RDBMS. So a high five to all the people who dare go against convention and take a chance on a new approach to data modeling being it Mongo, Riak, CouchDb, Redis, Neo4j, Cassandra, HBase or any other awesome opensource project out there.
    • jacques_chester 15y ago
      These are not new approaches to data modelling. Document databases, network databases and hierarchical databases (IMS, CODASYL etc) predate relational databases by decades. Relational is the universal default for a simple reason. When first introduced it proved to be far better, in every conceivable way, than the technologies it replaced. It's as simple as that. Relational is a slam-dunk, no-brainer for 99.99% of use cases. Still, if you really want a fast, proven system for one of the older models, you can get IBM to host stuff for you on a z/OS or z/TPF instance, running IMS. It'll have more predictable performance than AWS to boot.
• davidw 15y ago
  People seem to be jumping on a lot of the NoSQL stuff for no good reason. You can get a lot of mileage out of something like Postgres or Mysql, and they work pretty well for a lot of things. Ok, if you get huge, you might have to figure out something else, but that's a good problem to have. On the other hand, if you've lost all your data, you're not going to get huge. I had to use MongoDB recently, and I wasn't very pleased with it. It wasn't really appropriate for the project, which had data that would have fit better in a relational DB.
  • nmongo 15y ago
    I SUBMITTED THIS STORY AND IT IS IN FACT A HOAX!
• js4all 15y ago
  Losing data is one of the most serious bugs. When I am using a DBMS in production, I have to rely on it 100%. I believe the complains made could be real because MongoDB is highly optimized for speed. But, as long as there is no documented and maybe reproducible case, this post can't be taken for real.
  • vannevar 15y ago
    I'm very skeptical of the lost data claims. People using MongoDB are writing new code. New code has bugs. When data is lost, it's certainly more convenient to claim 'the datastore ate it' than to admit you have a critical bug in your own code.
    • js4all 15y ago
      I agree. And this is why I like CouchDB's versioning. In similar cases we could track down unwanted deletes using previous versions of the document in question. Without those, it could easily be interpreted as "data loss".
• pwaring 15y ago
  "They just disappeared sometimes. Cause unknown." If the cause is unknown, how can you blame it on a given piece of software?
  • jacques_chester 15y ago
    I presume he's referring to the silent truncation stunt Mongo has been accused of by others before. "Oh THAT", say Mongo boosters. "You should have read the IRC logs of June 22nd", they continue, "there was a 3 line patch posted in the channel. It totes fixes that problem".
• nikcub 15y ago
  Links about Foursquare's problems with MongoDB. The site was down for a while when their 1.6 instance crashed: * http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/ http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/ * http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/10/4square_mongodb_outage http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/10/4square_mongodb_outage * http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/thread/528a94f287e9d77e?pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/th... I like MongoDB, it is easy to setup, work with and to understand. I think it has an opportunity to become the mysql of nosql (in more ways than one) Foursquare and 10gen (the makers of MongoDB) share USV as an investor.
  • vannevar 15y ago
    It should be noted that this was not really a problem with MongoDB. Foursquare used a poorly-chosen shard key that caused a disproportionate load on one of its shards, and on top of that did not have proper system monitoring in place to alert them that a server was running out of RAM. It should also be noted that no data was lost in the process of resolving the problem.
    • latch 15y ago
      And both companies were extremely transparent about it and the community generally appreciated the way it was handled: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mongodb-user/UoqU8ofp134 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mongodb-user/UoqU8of...
    • nikcub 15y ago
      I thought both Foursquare and 10gen handled the situation then very well, especially considering how much traction the story got (it had all the elements - a popular service, a popular new database, etc.) I was sort of suggesting that this anonymous post may have come from somebody at Foursquare, since what is described kinda matches what happen there. The 'politics' element could also match because of the common investor - but I see that both 10gen and 4sq have responded here saying that they do not know who wrote this - which I believe.
  • nmongo 15y ago
• itaborai83 15y ago
  Given the current discussion about MongoDB, I think that the following post is worth revisiting. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538037 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538037 I'm not a Riak user, but I agree with Basho's analysis on this case.
• marcf 15y ago
  Are we sure this isn't an Oracle employee?
  • jacques_chester 15y ago
    Does it matter, if they're right? Edit: to the downvoters, this is a serious question.
    • vannevar 15y ago
      Does it matter, if they're right? No, of course not. But the point is that it would be easy to generate a post like this just by going back over the critical bug list for previous versions, and throwing in an unsubstantiated claim of 'mysterious data loss.' And Oracle does have the incentive and the means to engage in an old fashioned Microsoft-style FUD campaign. They've already launched their 'embrace-and-extend' strategy: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/519708 http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/519708 .
    • latch 15y ago
      Absolutely it does. Conflicts of interest should always, always be disclosed. It doesn't make them more wrong, but it certainly matters. And, given that none of the serious allegations the OP made are verifiable, it matters that much more.
  • lawnchair_larry 15y ago
    Yes, we are. All the reasonable people and William of Occam are, anyway.
• mark_l_watson 15y ago
  Yes, if people are sing MongoDB for applications requiring ACID, it is probably not the best fit. However, there are many great use cases that MongoDB is a great fit for, sometimes characterized by needing a lot of read slaves for complex analytics, where data loss is not a lose-the-company proposition, rapid prototyping, etc. I just ported a Java GWT + Objectify appengine application to run on an EC2 with MongoDB and it was shockingly easy to do. Also, you an give up some write performance for increased data safety. MongoDB (along with PostgreSQL, RDF data sotres, and sometimes Neo4J) is solidly in my preferred tool set.
• zobzu 15y ago
  I've had similar performance in my use case (big joins and very large tables) using PostgreSQL (in my case) and disabling sync() to disk, and tuning the buffers, as with the various NoSQL I tried. It seems to me that NoSQL does not really bring speed. Just scalability and a different model. Hopefully most of them don't lose data at random. PG certainly doesn't, even with sync() off. I have not tested the scalability of PG.
  • politician 15y ago
    "big joins" ? Aren't joins one of the things that NoSQL loudly and proudly announces that it isn't suitable for?
• latch 15y ago
  Am I the only one who's ever forgotten the where clause in an update or delete statement? For all the proof presented, for all we know that's the cause of their lost data.
• bdarfler 15y ago
  Yah, MySql 4.0 sucked, thats why I don't use 5.5 now. Come on.
• jmspring 15y ago
  Somewhat off topic, but mongo recently came up in a design discussion. Some of the points here are intereting to consider/evaluate against the most recent version. My question is, given Mongo and the other NoSQL solutions, has anyone come up with a comparison of strong and weak points across different application types? Feature lists really aren't always useful - as noted about things like code maturity, etc.
• LeafStorm 15y ago
  Just for comparison, CouchDB has had one major bug that could cause the loss of data, detailed here: http://couchdb.apache.org/notice/1.0.1.html http://couchdb.apache.org/notice/1.0.1.html The bug was only triggered when the delayed_commits option was on (holds off on fsyncing when lots of write operations are coming in) and there was both a write conflict and a period of inactivity - when the database was shut down, any writes that happened afterwards would not be saved. They immediately worked to develop a process that would prevent any data from being lost if you didn't shut down the server, then a week later had released an emergency bugfix version without the bug. Then later they released a tool that could recover any data lost from the bug if the database hadn't been compacted. That's the kind of attitude database developers need to have towards data integrity.
  • itaborai83 15y ago
    One of the things that I love about Couch is that the standard way to shutdown the process is simply doing a kill -9 on the server process. No data loss. No Worries. Want to back up your data? rsync it and be done with it. Couch may have its warts, but it is damn reliable.
    • maxogden 15y ago
      I've heard from many people that with Couch you get "all of your disappointment up front"
      • markazevedo 15y ago
        Which is to say, not much?
      • itaborai83 15y ago
        I feel that Couch has too much server side programming. It can be off puting sometimes. If anyone wants to make some money, I'd suggest them putting a server on top of a couch cluster that receives mongo queries. I mean, how hard can it be to 1) Manage some indexes, 2) Keep some metadata around and 3) Build some half-assed single index query planner? Couch is already a solid piece of technology. It just needs a better API to "sit" on top of it, kinda like what Membase is doing now. edit: or on top of Riak, Cassandra, PostgreSQL or etc ... on the API side, Mongo has clearly won.
• MikeCampo 15y ago
  Very interesting. I recently worked on a little side project using MongoDB and I noticed during testing that some records would disappear at random. Glad to see this has happened to others. I suppose it's time to check out Redis.
• xxqs 15y ago
  I wonder why nobody mentions that MongoDB supports x86 CPU architecture ONLY. It keeps unaligned data in its memory structures, and all operations are explicitly little-endian. So, no chance to get it running on any ARM, MIPS, PowerPC or SPARC
  • christkv 15y ago
    There is a fork on github no os86 don't remember the name but is supposed to compile to arm
    • xxqs 15y ago
      yes, I talked to the guy. The problem is, that the mainstream maintainers completely ignore the problem, so there's no official support anyway.
• Encryptor 15y ago
  This is textbook projecting. The team deployed an immature database and tried to push its limits, and now they're saying: "it sucks!". Sure, a 2 year-old database is the problem, not your ability to make architectural decisions. Sounds like someone is looking for a scapegoat. They took a risk and failed and this is just a poor way of coping with it. It's OK to publish your experiences on your blog (which they did a few days ago). It's NOT OK to go around the Internets publishing "anonymous" articles about how MongoDB sucked for you, as if no one will see what you did there. That's just defamation, folks. On a side note, we also looked at MongoDB and, after running a few tests, we concluded that it is a glorified key-value pair storage. That said, we did use it in a few small-scale projects and it works great. The bottom line: choose the right tool for the job and don't bitch about the tools when you fail.
  • einhverfr 15y ago
    I would say however that a significant subset of NoSQL deployments (perhaps even a large majority) are by definition lacking in sound architectural decisions. I'd argue the same goes for ORM-based database access too..... The failure exists because many developers don't ask a few key questions up front: 1) What exactly can the database do for us? 2) Which of these do we need? For example, is the database going to be a point of integration? 3) What failsafe or security measures do we want to count on in the database?> These don't always have objectively right/wrong answers but failure to ask the questions leads to poor use of databases regardless of what technologies are chosen.
• ehwizard 15y ago
  From CTO of 10gen First, I tried to find any client of ours with a track record like this and have been unsuccessful. I personally have looked at every single customer case that’s every come in (there are about 1600 of them) and cannot match this story to any of them. I am confused as to the origin here, so answers cannot be complete in some cases. Some comments below, but the most important thing I wanted to say is if you have an issue with MongoDB please reach out so that we can help. https://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user https://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user is the support forum, or try the IRC channel. > 1. MongoDB issues writes in unsafe ways by default in order to win benchmarks The reason for this has absolutely nothing to do with benchmarks, and everything to do with the original API design and what we were trying to do with it. To be fair, the uses of MongoDB have shifted a great deal since then, so perhaps the defaults could change. The philosophy is to give the driver and the user fine grained control over acknowledgement of write completions. Not all writes are created equal, and it makes sense to be able to check on writes in different ways. For example with replica sets, you can do things like “don’t acknowledge this write until its on nodes in at least 2 data centers.” > 2. MongoDB can lose data in many startling ways > 1. They just disappeared sometimes. Cause unknown. There has never been a case of a record disappearing that we either have not been able to trace to a bug that was fixed immediately, or other environmental issues. If you can link to a case number, we can at least try to understand or explain what happened. Clearly a case like this would be incredibly serious, and if this did happen to you I hope you told us and if you did, we were able to understand and fix immediately. > 2. Recovery on corrupt database was not successful, pre transaction log. This is expected, repairing was generally meant for single servers, which itself is not recommended without journaling. If a secondary crashes without journaling, you should resync it from the primary. As an FYI, journaling is the default and almost always used in v2.0. > 3. Replication between master and slave had gaps in the oplogs, causing slaves to be missing records the master had. Yes, there is no checksum, and yes, the replication status had the slaves current Do you have the case number? I do not see a case where this happened, but if true would obviously be a critical bug. > 4. Replication just stops sometimes, without error. Monitor > your replication status! If you mean that an error condition can occur without issuing errors to a client, then yes, this is possible. If you want verification that replication is working at write time, you can do it with w=2 getLastError parameter. > 3. MongoDB requires a global write lock to issue any write > Under a write-heavy load, this will kill you. If you run a blog, you maybe don't care b/c your R:W ratio is so high. The read/write lock is definitely an issue, but a lot of progress made and more to come. 2.0 introduced better yielding, reducing the scenarios where locks are held through slow IO operations. 2.2 will continue the yielding improvements and introduce finer grained concurrency. > 4. MongoDB's sharding doesn't work that well under load > Adding a shard under heavy load is a nightmare. Mongo either moves chunks between shards so quickly it DOSes the production traffic, or refuses to more chunks altogether. Once a system is at or exceeding its capacity, moving data off is of course going to be hard. I talk about this in every single presentation I’ve ever given about sharding[0]: do no wait too long to add capacity. If you try to add capacity to a system at 100% utilization, it is not going to work. > 5. mongos is unreliable > The mongod/config server/mongos architecture is actually pretty reasonable and clever. Unfortunately, mongos is complete garbage. Under load, it crashed anywhere from every few hours to every few days. Restart supervision didn't always help b/c sometimes it would throw some assertion that would bail out a critical thread, but the process would stay running. Double fail. I know of no such critical thread, can you send more details? > 6. MongoDB actually once deleted the entire dataset > MongoDB, 1.6, in replica set configuration, would sometimes determine the wrong node (often an empty node) was the freshest copy of the data available. It would then DELETE ALL THE DATA ON THE REPLICA (which may have been the 700GB of good data) > They fixed this in 1.8, thank god. Cannot find any relevant client issue, case nor commit. Can you please send something that we can look at? > 7. Things were shipped that should have never been shipped > Things with known, embarrassing bugs that could cause data problems were in "stable" releases--and often we weren't told about these issues until after they bit us, and then only b/c we had a super duper crazy platinum support contract with 10gen. There is no crazy platinum contract and every issue we every find is put into the public jira. Every fix we make is public. Fixes have cases which are public. Without specifics, this is incredibly hard to discuss. When we do fix bugs we will try to get to users as fast as possible. > 8. Replication was lackluster on busy servers This simply sounds like a case of an overloaded server. I mentioned before, but if you want guaranteed replication, use w=2 form of getLastError. > But, the real problem: > 1. Don't lose data, be very deterministic with data > 2. Employ practices to stay available > 3. Multi-node scalability > 4. Minimize latency at 99% and 95% > 5. Raw req/s per resource > 10gen's order seems to be, #5, then everything else in some order. #1 ain't in the top 3. This is simply not true. Look at commits, look at what fixes we have made when. We have never shipped a release with a secret bug or anything remotely close to that and then secretly told certain clients. To be honest, if we were focused on raw req/s we would fix some of the code paths that waste a ton of cpu cycles. If we really cared about benchmark performance over anything else we would have dealt with the locking issues earlier so multi-threaded benchmarks would be better. (Even the most naive user benchmarks are usually multi-threaded.) MongoDB is still a new product, there are definitely rough edges, and a seemingly infinite list of things to do.[1] If you want to come talk to the MongoDB team, both our offices hold open office hours[2] where you can come and talk to the actual development teams. We try to be incredibly open, so please come and get to know us. -Eliot [0] http://www.10gen.com/presentations#speaker__eliot_horowitz http://www.10gen.com/presentations#speaker__eliot_horowitz [1] http://jira.mongodb.org/ http://jira.mongodb.org/ [2] http://www.10gen.com/office-hours http://www.10gen.com/office-hours
• nullymcnull 15y ago
  These posts are exceptionally well-timed for me. I'm currently wrangling with one of those problems that is just not solved well with relational databases, or even the flat document store that my company already uses. I've been looking hard at Redis and Mongo, and of late I'm leaning towards Mongo. You know what? Having read these posts and the threads - and having extracted what little in the way of factual datapoints I could from them - I'm pretty sure I'll still be riding into production with Mongo. Some of you guys who were all aboard the NOSQL UBER ALLES hype train a year or two ago now seem to be swinging back - with scrapes and bruises from some truly harebrained misdeployments, no doubt - to a reactionary 'All NoSQL are doomed to reimplement everything relational' nihilism. Back to shitty OR tools and ugly-ass joins for everyone, damnit! Harumph. I could write a novel just quoting and responding to some of the stupid pronouncements and prescriptions for correctness on these Mongo threads' comments. Anyways. With regards to this specific post: Let's rewind a couple of years. I work for a significantly smaller company than our anon raconteur, from the sound of it. At roughly the same time as he adopted Mongo, I was also looking hard at it, to solve some problems where the relational options available to us weren't going to cut the mustard. Damn, did Mongo look cool, fun even. The flexibility of having arbitrary object graphs in it and querying down into subdocument properties with real indexing on them, well, it sets nearly any developer's heart a-flutter, particularly those of us who work on dynamic web stuff a fair bit. Sadly, I have to be an engineer and pragmatist first, I have to think about much more than what is sexy and comfortable for devs. I've been through my share of 3AM wake-up world-enders, I've learned the hard lessons. I considered variables like basic maintainability by ops people, credibility of the vendor, track record, robust redundancy and availability solutions, how far up shit creek we'd be in a disaster recovery scenario, etc. And after thorough research I decided that, for my much smaller company which can afford to be judiciously bleeding-edge where it makes sense to, Mongo was just not clearing the bar. I sucked it up and used unsexy properly normalized relational database tables, then utilized memory caching and async updates to try and paper over the performance issues inherent in that scheme. What was anon doing? Charging full steam ahead into the wild unknown with Mongo, on an effort that was apparently important to a userbase of millions at a "high profile" company. That's some mighty responsible stewardship of the company, or even just the IT department's, broader concerns right there. Now, I understand that it totally makes sense to have used Mongo 1.x as a scrappy startup on a greenfield project, no problem. But this guy was in a different situation. At that scale in a BFC, conservatism rules, and it rules for a reason. I think I am starting to understand why anon is anon. In any case, we're likely going to roll with Mongo soon. It is indeed maturing, and I'm a lot more comfortable with it on all of my criteria these days. I have possibly read more of the JIRA issues than some of the devs, and they are prioritizing the Right Things - at least for my tastes. By my estimation it is on the right track. Even having not used it in production yet, I can identify some things people are complaining about here as complete and utter RTFM-fail, misunderstanding of what it is they're deploying and whether what they expect out of it is realistic before they begin. I understand the tradeoffs of Mongo, and in my particular situation they make good sense.
• harryh 15y ago
  Hi, I run engineering for foursquare. About a year and a half ago my colleagues and I and made the decision to migrate to MongoDB for our primary data store. Currently we have dozens of MongoDB instances across several different data clusters storing over a TB of data and handling 10s of thousands of requests per second (mostly reads but the write load is reasonably high as well). Have we run into problems with MongoDB along the way? Yes, of course we have. It is a new technology and problems happen. Have they been problematic enough to seriously threaten our data? No they have not. Has Eliot and the rest of his staff @ 10Gen been extremely responsive and helpful whenever we run into problems? Yes, absolutely. Their level of support is amazing. MongoDB is a complicated beast (as are most datastores). It makes tradeoffs that you need to understand when thinking about using it. It's not necessarily for everyone. But it most certainly can be used by serious companies building serious products. Foursquare is proof of that. I'm happy to answer any questions about our experience that the HN community might have. -harryh
  • fedd 15y ago
    have users of foursquare run into problems? were they serious? did someone lose money? let's ask. it would answer whether to use an eventually consistent db.
    • harryh 15y ago
      > have users of foursquare run into problems? Of course we've run into problems from time to time. No one goes from nothing to foursquare's level of success without running into some bumps along the way. > were they serious? did someone lose money? No. > it would answer whether to use an eventually consistent db MongoDB actually isn't really an eventually consistent datastore. It doesn't (for example) allow writes to multiple nodes across a network partition and then have a mechanism for resolving conflicts.
      • gsharm 15y ago
        Where do you finally persist the data in that case?
      • 15y ago
• freerobby 15y ago
  http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22powered+by+mongodb%22 http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&i...
• ryanfitz 15y ago
  I think MongoDB's biggest problem is people expect mongo to take care of all their scalability issues for them. In reality once you start hitting a certain scale you need to start rearchitecting your system, no datastore can automatically handle this for you, but perhaps mongoDB let you get a little bit bigger before this became a big issue.
• nomoremongo 15y ago
  Pastebin author here. Refutations are going to fall into two categories, it seems: 1. Questioning my honesty 2. Questioning my competence Re #1, I'm not sure what you imagine my incentive to lie might be. I honestly just intended this to benefit the community, nothing more. I'm genuinely troubled that it might cause some problems for 10gen, b/c, again, Eliot & co are nice people. Re #2, all I can do is attempt to reassure you we're generally smart and capable fellows. For example, these same systems exhibit none of these problems, and we're sleeping quite well through the night, on the new database system they've moved to. I'll omit the name of the database system just so there is no conflict that might undermine my integrity and motives (see #1). edit: (also, there are a few comments about "someone unknown/new around here"... trust me, I'm not new or unknown. I'm a regular.)
  • nomoremongo 15y ago
    Some are also (fairly) questioning "why the anonymity?", and "where is the evidence?" Those two things are connected: I can't provide the evidence without revealing identity. And the reason for the anonymity is we still have some small databases with 10gen and a current support contract. I had intended to go public with all this after we had transitioned off the system entirely, but more and more reports have continued to pop up of people having trouble with MongoDB, and it seemed as though delaying would be imprudent. An anonymous warning would be more valuable than saying nothing. So--if you choose to ignore or dismiss our claims, you're entitled. :-) I still feel satisfied that I did what I needed to do.
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    • ajsharp 15y ago
      Are you willing to reveal your and your company's identity once you're completely off of Mongo?
• bbulkow 15y ago
  Disclosure: I wrote a product called Citrusleaf, which also plays in the NoSQL space. My focus in starting Citruseaf wasn't features, it was operational dependability. I had worked at companies who had to take their system offline when they had the greatest exposure - like getting massive load from the Yahoo front page (back in the day). Citrusleaf focuses on monitoring, integration with monitoring software, operations. We call ourselves a real-time database because we've focused on predictable performance (and very high performance). We don't have as many features as mongo. You can't do a javascript/json long running batch job. We'll get around to features - right now we're focused on uptime and operational efficiency. Our customers are in digital advertising, where they have 50,000 transactions per second on terabyte datasets (see us at ad:tech in NYC this coming week). Here's a performance analysis we did: http://bit.ly/rRlq9V http://bit.ly/rRlq9V This theory that "mongo is designed to run on in-memory data sets" is, frankly, terrible --- simply because mongo doesn't give you the control to keep you in memory. You don't know when you're going to spill out of memory. There's no way to "timeout" a page cache IO. There's no asynchronous interface for page IO. For all of these reasons - and our internal testing showing page IO is 5x slower than aio; the reason all professional databases use aio and raw devices - we coded Citrusleaf using normal multithreaded io strategies. With Citrusleaf, we do it differently, and that difference is huge. We keep our indexes in memory. Our indexes are the most efficient anywhere - more objects, fea. You configure Citrusleaf with the amount of memory you want to use, and apply policies when you start flowing out of memory. Like not taking writes. Like expiring the least-recently-used data. That's an example of our focus on operations. If your application use pattern changes, you can't have your database go down, or go so slowly as to be nearly unusable. Again, take my comments with a grain of salt, but with Citrusleaf you'll have great uptime, fewer servers, a far less complex installation. Sure, it's not free, but talk to us and we'll find a way to make it work for your project.
  • pbiggar 15y ago
    Looks interesting. May I suggest you provide a hosted service? With mongo, I tried it online and got a feel for it before we signed up, and there are multiple hosted services so I didn't have to worry about setting it up in the cloud. Looking at citrusleaf.com, though the blurb sounds like I might like it, nothing else really helps me. It's NoSQL, but that doesn't say anything. I know that memcache has a use case, and I know mongo's use case, and redis', but I don't see yours. (PS I know you're enterprise software, but still).
• HarrietTubgirl 15y ago
  If it's new and you are pushing its boundaries, you will get screwed. Always. This goes for new major releases of MySQL just as well as MongoDB.
• dblock 15y ago
  Remember Ingres? Me neither. http://bit.ly/uhb6OY http://bit.ly/uhb6OY
• justin_vanw 15y ago
  Shhhhhhhh! As someone who works at startups, the fact that my competitors would trust something like MongoDB with their data is awesome.
• rfurlan 15y ago
  I just recently published an article describing my experience migrating from SQL Server to MongoDB, you can read it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203601 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203601 I agree with the author that MongoDB is green, maybe not quite ready for prime time yet. All things considered, I realize we took a risk by switching and while I am quite happy with MongoDB, I do worry that at some point we will experience a failure condition we might not be able to recover from.
• hendler 15y ago
  10gen might become a victim of it's own popularity. I have heard: * Yes, playing with Mongo is playing with fire. Know what you are doing. We don't claim that you should use us as your only database. * We're going to fix these issues soon. The beginning days of MySQL etc were also frightening, with Oracle and MS SQL Server admins warning of all the dangerous things that can happen. If they confront their issues, I think it's just a matter of time before Mongo wins the NoSQL race. They have what matters most - good people, a brand, and great expectations from customers.
  • nmongo 15y ago
    I SUBMITTED THIS STORY AND IT IS IN FACT A HOAX!
• captaincrunch 15y ago
  The largest website on the internet uses MySQL, why can't you? (Facebook uses MySQL)
  • ceejayoz 15y ago
    Facebook also has the engineering resources to smack it into submission.
• itaborai83 15y ago
  I feel like a dick, but I have got to ask. Is it Disney? Disney is on both the couchbase and 10gen sites. Both sites mention that they are using their NoSQL solutions to power their social and online games. Couchbase powers Zynga and can arguably be considered the leader on this specific market. Am I close?
• yaix 15y ago
  Some guy posted some unproven random claims on pastebin, and people take it that serious? "It must be true, I've seen it on the Internet!" 500+ upvotes? c'mon.
• tlogan 15y ago
  We are all engineers and MongoDB is open source. Maybe the easiest way to evaluate the project is to review the source code. This will give at least some idea about quality of MongoDB - of course MongoDB can still be a great product even if code is not written well but it is important indicator. What is your comment about code written? Is it maintainable? Is it modular? Doe s it seem well written?
  • nmongo 15y ago
    I SUBMITTED THIS STORY AND IT IS IN FACT A HOAX!
• bitops 15y ago
  This post is unparalleled FUD. We use MongoDB in production and all the issues we've encountered have been either environment or configuration related. There are plenty of things about MongoDB I don't like but this OP is a total coward. If you've got something to say, put your name on it and come out in the open. This type of post is the worst of its "hiding behind Internet anonymity" kind. And for the record, I don't think Oracle is behind this. They're confident in their Exadata offering and have little to gain by posting this kind of crap around MongoDB. Besides, Larry Ellison has never been afraid to openly taunt his competitors.
  • nmongo 15y ago
    I SUBMITTED THIS STORY AND IT IS IN FACT A HOAX!
  • prodigal_erik 15y ago
    I wouldn't use my True Name for serious criticism of a tool that may become popular, because I expect that to find that a career-limiting move. E.g., I think MySQL has reckless contempt for data integrity, but that doesn't mean I'd rather starve than ever be considered by a hiring manager at any MySQL shop.
  • wladimir 15y ago
    This is simply anonymous vile FUD. It does not even read like an honest story. There is also not one reference to a real case, or anything that can be sourced at all. There seems to be a FUD offensive going against MongoDB for some reason. The thing that worries me most is that this article got so many upvotes.
• nmongo 15y ago
  DISCLAIMER: I submitted this story and it is in fact a hoax that has gone too far, you got trolled, truly frightening how gullible most of you are. DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ ON THE INTERNET!
  • Confusion 15y ago
    how gullible most of you are That's an unsubstantiated, and probably false, assumption. There are a lot of people in this thread debating the merits of the complaints and most doubt those merits. Even more people are not participating in this thread at all and you don't have a clue what they think. If they're anything like me, they thought "another day, another complaint about product X." and didn't draw any conclusions from this post. You seem too convinced of your own greatness to seriously consider the possibility that maybe most people here are actually sensible and don't rush to judgments. To me, this post portrays you as an 18-year old that was the smartest in his highschool, but has yet to realize and accept just how awfully many people out there are smarter and wiser. God help the people around you if you're older than 28.
  • donpark 15y ago
    All you succeeded in doing was raise a question about which discussion followed. Anyone can do that, even a 3-year old.