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I was just starting a new project and had to make a choice. I looked at the MongoDB 3.0.x release notes to see if the project has managed to improve in the last

by Rezo 11y ago

I was just starting a new project and had to make a choice. I looked at the MongoDB 3.0.x release notes to see if the project has managed to improve in the last couple of years, and there are still way too many "data files are not correctly recovered following unexpected system restarts" and "race condition between inserts and checkpoints that could result in lost records" issues being fixed in each release for my liking. Different projects have different tolerances, of course. If I was leaning towards NoSQL I would probably choose something rock solid like DynamoDB on AWS. That thing (mostly) scales by simply throwing money at it, on my last project that had tens of millions of users it worked very well, but it's definitely not cheap. For my personal project I ended up going with PostgreSQL 9.4. The initial user experience is still as bad as I remember from years ago (after installing PostgreSQL on Ubuntu, neither the logged in user nor root have a default DB, can't even run psql, cannot create new DB's out of the box, and the tutorial(!) waxes on about "Architectural Fundamentals" instead of "Do x,y,z to install and insert a few rows of data"). With Postgres I'm able to have JSON type columns, where my unstructured documents are stored, as well as regular foreign keys, transactions and joins at the table level. So far I'm very pleased with how it's working out, I think it's a good middle ground between the flexibility of NoSQL and the reliability + querying power of SQL.

lobster_johnson 11y ago
> after installing PostgreSQL on Ubuntu Note that this is a mainly packaging and entirely the maintainer's fault: They typically run the database under a "postgres" user, so you'll have to do "sudo -u postgres createdb" or whatever. PostgreSQL itself doesn't care; if you install it from source and start the postmaster process as yourself, then you'll have full access right away. That said, Debian/Ubuntu packages typically don't set up a default environment for you as a convenience. It's debatable what it should do. Create a user and database for root? Postgres maps, by default, POSIX users to database users. If you run "apt-get install postgresql-server-9.4", who should it create database users for? Also, I'm not sure you're fair to the documentation you're referencing, which seems entirely reasoanble to me. Section 1.2 of the 94 manual's tutorial, "Architural Fundamentals", is pretty important, and it's short. But if you skip it, you'll get to the next section, "Creating a database", which tells you what need, and the next one goes into the SQL stuff. Both sections work if you've installed it from source (or Homebrew, which also runs Postgres as yourself). But it would be silly to expect this documentation to tell you how to specifically do it on Ubuntu.
- Rezo 11y ago
  I respectfully disagree. After reading the "Getting Started" guide, you might reasonably believe a developer would be setup and happily coding away, but in my experience it fails at the very first steps. Which is fine, if you want to keep a high bar, but don't be surprised when people still think the product is "harder to use" than MongoDB or whatever in 2015. Blaming maintainers does nothing for the users, take ownership of the experience! If you want to be seen as approachable and easy to use, you have to actually target people new to PostgreSQL and not write the basic guide assuming you're compiling from source on Solaris or have a dedicated site DB administrator. The magic phrase "sudo -u postgres createdb" does not appear anywhere on postgresql.org that I can see, and as a experienced user you know that's not the end of it (can I use psql as my regular user after running it? No, of course not. There's many more entirely undocumented arcane incantations left!). I claim, it is in fact impossible to get up an running with no previous knowledge if all you have access to is the postgres site. Thankfully there's Stackoverflow, so at least some users are still getting through the gauntlet. Sorry for the rant. I get a bit frustrated when I see a great project that I love dropping users through a bad onboarding experience (I know, contributions welcome...) Just for reference, check out: https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-ubuntu/ https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-... https://docs.mongodb.org/getting-started/node/ https://docs.mongodb.org/getting-started/node/ In fact, you get different sets of documentations for the whole matrix of OS * ENV (Shell, Node, Python, C++, Java, C#). When the docs have their target audience down to a T ("Why yes, I AM a C++ developer on OS X! This looks like the perfect fit!"), it's easy to see why they're so popular.

by Rezo 11y ago

lobster_johnson 11y ago

> after installing PostgreSQL on Ubuntu Note that this is a mainly packaging and entirely the maintainer's fault: They typically run the database under a "postgres" user, so you'll have to do "sudo -u postgres createdb" or whatever. PostgreSQL itself doesn't care; if you install it from source and start the postmaster process as yourself, then you'll have full access right away. That said, Debian/Ubuntu packages typically don't set up a default environment for you as a convenience. It's debatable what it should do. Create a user and database for root? Postgres maps, by default, POSIX users to database users. If you run "apt-get install postgresql-server-9.4", who should it create database users for? Also, I'm not sure you're fair to the documentation you're referencing, which seems entirely reasoanble to me. Section 1.2 of the 94 manual's tutorial, "Architural Fundamentals", is pretty important, and it's short. But if you skip it, you'll get to the next section, "Creating a database", which tells you what need, and the next one goes into the SQL stuff. Both sections work if you've installed it from source (or Homebrew, which also runs Postgres as yourself). But it would be silly to expect this documentation to tell you how to specifically do it on Ubuntu.

Rezo 11y ago
I respectfully disagree. After reading the "Getting Started" guide, you might reasonably believe a developer would be setup and happily coding away, but in my experience it fails at the very first steps. Which is fine, if you want to keep a high bar, but don't be surprised when people still think the product is "harder to use" than MongoDB or whatever in 2015. Blaming maintainers does nothing for the users, take ownership of the experience! If you want to be seen as approachable and easy to use, you have to actually target people new to PostgreSQL and not write the basic guide assuming you're compiling from source on Solaris or have a dedicated site DB administrator. The magic phrase "sudo -u postgres createdb" does not appear anywhere on postgresql.org that I can see, and as a experienced user you know that's not the end of it (can I use psql as my regular user after running it? No, of course not. There's many more entirely undocumented arcane incantations left!). I claim, it is in fact impossible to get up an running with no previous knowledge if all you have access to is the postgres site. Thankfully there's Stackoverflow, so at least some users are still getting through the gauntlet. Sorry for the rant. I get a bit frustrated when I see a great project that I love dropping users through a bad onboarding experience (I know, contributions welcome...) Just for reference, check out: https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-ubuntu/ https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-... https://docs.mongodb.org/getting-started/node/ https://docs.mongodb.org/getting-started/node/ In fact, you get different sets of documentations for the whole matrix of OS * ENV (Shell, Node, Python, C++, Java, C#). When the docs have their target audience down to a T ("Why yes, I AM a C++ developer on OS X! This looks like the perfect fit!"), it's easy to see why they're so popular.