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I worked at a Data Analytics start up in Palo Alto back in 2011 and we had 8 or 9 databases in our arsenal for storing different types of data. MongoDB was by

by joeblau 10y ago

I worked at a Data Analytics start up in Palo Alto back in 2011 and we had 8 or 9 databases in our arsenal for storing different types of data. MongoDB was by far the worst and most unstable database we had. It was so bad that for the presidential debate, I had to stay up and flip servers all night because even though the shards were perfectly distributed, the database would crash and fail over to two other machines which couldn't handle our entire social media stream. We ended up calling some guys from MongoDB in to help us troubleshoot the issue and the guy basically said "Yeah we know that's a limitation; you should probably buy more machines to distribute the load." I like the concept of Mongo, but there are other more robust NoSQL databases to choose from.

ajmurmann 10y ago
I had a similar experience in 2011 with Mango where we were running map reduce jobs which Mongo advertised to support. The whole system got blocked from running the map reduce and the Tengen consultant sighed when we told him we were running map reduce jobs.
- LionessLover 10y ago
  Which isn't the best argument to make against MongoDB since you should have known - it's even part of their course curriculum - that map/reduce is not the optimal way to aggregate in MongoDB. They have their own aggregation framework (https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/aggregation-pipeline/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/aggregation-pipeline/). I have no intention of defending MongoDB because what do I know, never worked with it in real life - but just out of curiosity I took the free courses they offer (https://university.mongodb.com/ https://university.mongodb.com/) and I find that a sizable share of the complaints about MongoDB come from people who don't seem to have learned much about the product they are using. It's like people complaining their new truck behaves badly in water. A lot of critics seem to have chosen MongoDB when they needed a SQL DB from day one. If you need full flexibility to (re)combine data you need SQL, for example. A document store isn't "schema-less" at all - much of the schema is built-in and very inflexible after that.

by joeblau 10y ago

ajmurmann 10y ago

I had a similar experience in 2011 with Mango where we were running map reduce jobs which Mongo advertised to support. The whole system got blocked from running the map reduce and the Tengen consultant sighed when we told him we were running map reduce jobs.

LionessLover 10y ago
Which isn't the best argument to make against MongoDB since you should have known - it's even part of their course curriculum - that map/reduce is not the optimal way to aggregate in MongoDB. They have their own aggregation framework (https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/aggregation-pipeline/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/aggregation-pipeline/). I have no intention of defending MongoDB because what do I know, never worked with it in real life - but just out of curiosity I took the free courses they offer (https://university.mongodb.com/ https://university.mongodb.com/) and I find that a sizable share of the complaints about MongoDB come from people who don't seem to have learned much about the product they are using. It's like people complaining their new truck behaves badly in water. A lot of critics seem to have chosen MongoDB when they needed a SQL DB from day one. If you need full flexibility to (re)combine data you need SQL, for example. A document store isn't "schema-less" at all - much of the schema is built-in and very inflexible after that.