6 ms·

A shame that a company like mongo can exist while a company like rethink folds.

by joneholland 10y ago

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Who says Mongo won't go eventually as well?
- bhouston 10y ago
  MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. Well promoted and easy to get going with. Hopefully they use the money they have to rewrite MongoDB to be better.
  - colemickens 10y ago
    >MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. I'm not a Windows fan, but that's harsh. http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-never-ever-ever-use-mongodb/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...
    - threeseed 10y ago
      That post is utter garbage. Seriously. Most of the the points are for issues that were fixed years ago and then you get classics like "forces the poor habit of implicit schemas in nearly all usecases" as if some developer is going to somehow stumble on the fact is it a schemaless database. It's like trying to say "Linux is shit" because of issues found in 1.0 of the kernel.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - colemickens 10y ago
        Normally when things are citing @aphyr, I tend to give them some weight, but even aphyr's post is rather old. Thanks for the heads up, I'll do more investigation before posting the link again.
    - 010a 10y ago
      Most of those points are fearmongering, outdated, opinions, or improperly cited. Every database has problems. Mongo has more than most. But I honestly think people dislike it so vehemently primarily because they've monetized so strongly.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Okay...but if Rethink couldn't make their business self-sustaining, why would Mongo when there are a plethora of other open source databases/datastores that can do Mongo's job better than Mongo? EDIT: We'll just wait for Mongo to burn through all their cash then.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      Because having the better product (often) doesn't matter: see Windows vs Apple in the early days. Mongo has a strong community, which translates into a plethora of articles/blog-posts/tutorials/etc that secures its niche. From there it's possible to make money with things like consulting fees to help fix the problems it created in the first place. It's all about execution. Case and point: I know what (purportedly) makes MongoDB special. I have no idea what RethinkDB is supposed to do, other than store data. Yes, I could check their site, but the point is I'm already familiar with Mongo's reputation. All of this contributes to a lesser product winning over a better one.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        Well, real streaming queries, not just oplog tails for starters... a document database with the ability to do on-server joins. There's a few other things, but those are the two biggest ones over most others in the same mold... All that applies to Mongo, applies to rethink. Oh, yeah... and the ability to do shard + redundancy, where mongo you're either or have to do both. So scaling works a bit better. The admin tooling for rethink is better than anything I've really used in non-sql databases. And frankly even better than db admin tools, including sql based ones. It's just a really great, stable database with really good scaling for the majority of use cases.
        omginternets 10y ago
        That really wasn't the point.
      - vacri 10y ago
        At my last workplace, I finally asked: "Since you guys bitch about mongo so much, why do we use it? Why not something else?". Response: "It's not actually that bad, it does the job". Half the crap people speak about Mongo seems to be from either the early days, or from people who just like to complain. It certainly has it's issues, but there doesn't seem to be much community will to replace it with $superdupernosqldb.
  - threeseed 10y ago
    They largely did with version 3.0 when they switched to Wiredtiger. https://objectrocket.com/blog/company/mongodb-wiredtiger https://objectrocket.com/blog/company/mongodb-wiredtiger It's made a massive difference to performance and stability.
    - tshannon 10y ago
      Sounds like it hasn't helped with consistency https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads
      - threeseed 10y ago
        No a storage engine change doesn't help with consistency. This is the JIRA tracking that Jepsen stale read issue: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975
        tshannon 10y ago
        Yeah I'm glad to see the reopened it, because it was kind of a dick move to mark it as working as designed - https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975?focusedCommentId=892967&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-892967 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975?focusedCommentI...
guessmyname 10y ago
I believe this is because the Node.JS community still recommends MongoDB as the perfect database engine for their projects. There is even a name for their stack — MEAN, MondoDB + Express.JS + Angular.JS + Node.JS — which is kind of ironic because considering the rapid evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem having an acronym like that will make no sense in a couple of months since now people prefer React-like libraries / frameworks. Besides the JavaScript community I don't know of any other that enjoys to use MongoDB — which to be fair it's not that bad for what it offers, but you know — or ships it by default in bundle installers which are preferred by many young and/or newbie developers.
- vacri 10y ago
  Regarding rapid change, I've just come off 90 minutes of troubleshooting, whose end result was "upgrade npm to latest". I've never before used a package manager which had to be so often upgraded to solve issues.
- threeseed 10y ago
  MongoDB is very popular in the Big Data and IOT spaces. In most enterprises around 2/3 of the data in the lake is unstructured and comes from multiple systems we don't control or have visibility into. So it just gets dumped into HDFS until someone creates the relevant HCatalog schemas. Having a database like MongoDB at least allows you to extract and access some of the data in an automated fashion e.g. JSON reflection. It's especially useful for adhoc and lightweight model scoring and feature engineering.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  FWIW I've been in the Node/JS community for a few years and I've honestly rarely seen MEAN or Mongo be mentioned outside of blogs and corporate Hackathons (where Mongo is usually a sponsor). Maybe companies use it (I rarely pay attention to what people do with Node at companies) but I'll bet it's because of "hype" and its apparent popularity. Most JS devs I follow or talk to use a SQL database and dislike Mongo.
  - pluma 10y ago
tszming 10y ago
As a product creating so much job opportunities gloablly and didn't take you $0.01, I would like to ask: How shameful is it?

A shame that a company like mongo can exist while a company like rethink folds.

toomuchtodo 10y ago

Who says Mongo won't go eventually as well?

bhouston 10y ago
MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. Well promoted and easy to get going with. Hopefully they use the money they have to rewrite MongoDB to be better.
- colemickens 10y ago
  >MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. I'm not a Windows fan, but that's harsh. http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-never-ever-ever-use-mongodb/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...
  - threeseed 10y ago
    That post is utter garbage. Seriously. Most of the the points are for issues that were fixed years ago and then you get classics like "forces the poor habit of implicit schemas in nearly all usecases" as if some developer is going to somehow stumble on the fact is it a schemaless database. It's like trying to say "Linux is shit" because of issues found in 1.0 of the kernel.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - colemickens 10y ago
      Normally when things are citing @aphyr, I tend to give them some weight, but even aphyr's post is rather old. Thanks for the heads up, I'll do more investigation before posting the link again.
  - 010a 10y ago
    Most of those points are fearmongering, outdated, opinions, or improperly cited. Every database has problems. Mongo has more than most. But I honestly think people dislike it so vehemently primarily because they've monetized so strongly.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Okay...but if Rethink couldn't make their business self-sustaining, why would Mongo when there are a plethora of other open source databases/datastores that can do Mongo's job better than Mongo? EDIT: We'll just wait for Mongo to burn through all their cash then.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    Because having the better product (often) doesn't matter: see Windows vs Apple in the early days. Mongo has a strong community, which translates into a plethora of articles/blog-posts/tutorials/etc that secures its niche. From there it's possible to make money with things like consulting fees to help fix the problems it created in the first place. It's all about execution. Case and point: I know what (purportedly) makes MongoDB special. I have no idea what RethinkDB is supposed to do, other than store data. Yes, I could check their site, but the point is I'm already familiar with Mongo's reputation. All of this contributes to a lesser product winning over a better one.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      Well, real streaming queries, not just oplog tails for starters... a document database with the ability to do on-server joins. There's a few other things, but those are the two biggest ones over most others in the same mold... All that applies to Mongo, applies to rethink. Oh, yeah... and the ability to do shard + redundancy, where mongo you're either or have to do both. So scaling works a bit better. The admin tooling for rethink is better than anything I've really used in non-sql databases. And frankly even better than db admin tools, including sql based ones. It's just a really great, stable database with really good scaling for the majority of use cases.
      - omginternets 10y ago
        That really wasn't the point.
    - vacri 10y ago
      At my last workplace, I finally asked: "Since you guys bitch about mongo so much, why do we use it? Why not something else?". Response: "It's not actually that bad, it does the job". Half the crap people speak about Mongo seems to be from either the early days, or from people who just like to complain. It certainly has it's issues, but there doesn't seem to be much community will to replace it with $superdupernosqldb.
- threeseed 10y ago
  They largely did with version 3.0 when they switched to Wiredtiger. https://objectrocket.com/blog/company/mongodb-wiredtiger https://objectrocket.com/blog/company/mongodb-wiredtiger It's made a massive difference to performance and stability.
  - tshannon 10y ago
    Sounds like it hasn't helped with consistency https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads
    - threeseed 10y ago
      No a storage engine change doesn't help with consistency. This is the JIRA tracking that Jepsen stale read issue: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975
      - tshannon 10y ago
        Yeah I'm glad to see the reopened it, because it was kind of a dick move to mark it as working as designed - https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975?focusedCommentId=892967&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-892967 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975?focusedCommentI...

guessmyname 10y ago

I believe this is because the Node.JS community still recommends MongoDB as the perfect database engine for their projects. There is even a name for their stack — MEAN, MondoDB + Express.JS + Angular.JS + Node.JS — which is kind of ironic because considering the rapid evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem having an acronym like that will make no sense in a couple of months since now people prefer React-like libraries / frameworks. Besides the JavaScript community I don't know of any other that enjoys to use MongoDB — which to be fair it's not that bad for what it offers, but you know — or ships it by default in bundle installers which are preferred by many young and/or newbie developers.

vacri 10y ago
Regarding rapid change, I've just come off 90 minutes of troubleshooting, whose end result was "upgrade npm to latest". I've never before used a package manager which had to be so often upgraded to solve issues.
threeseed 10y ago
MongoDB is very popular in the Big Data and IOT spaces. In most enterprises around 2/3 of the data in the lake is unstructured and comes from multiple systems we don't control or have visibility into. So it just gets dumped into HDFS until someone creates the relevant HCatalog schemas. Having a database like MongoDB at least allows you to extract and access some of the data in an automated fashion e.g. JSON reflection. It's especially useful for adhoc and lightweight model scoring and feature engineering.
sotojuan 10y ago
FWIW I've been in the Node/JS community for a few years and I've honestly rarely seen MEAN or Mongo be mentioned outside of blogs and corporate Hackathons (where Mongo is usually a sponsor). Maybe companies use it (I rarely pay attention to what people do with Node at companies) but I'll bet it's because of "hype" and its apparent popularity. Most JS devs I follow or talk to use a SQL database and dislike Mongo.
- pluma 10y ago

tszming 10y ago

As a product creating so much job opportunities gloablly and didn't take you $0.01, I would like to ask: How shameful is it?