4 ms·

Nobody seems to like it. Someone has any idea on why the company still has their revenue increasing ?

by polote 6y ago

squeaky-clean 6y ago
I like it, but I don't really really chime in on threads where it's mostly Mongo bashing and jokes, and I'm guessing others who like MongoDB do the same. But I'd think MongoDB the company increasing in revenue isn't totally related to the quality of MongoDB the database. In fact a lot of their products seem to be targeting the "I don't want to learn how to set it up and understand indexes" crowd.
- vosper 6y ago
  Which is funny because one of the things hosted Mongo will do is constantly send you automated emails suggesting that you should create indexes (for tables that MySQL or Postgres would laugh at)
  - neeleshs 6y ago
    Sends emails when scanned vs returned record ratio is greater than a threshold. Not quite sure how something like this would be different for MySQL/postgres. If an index is missing for you query pattern, wouldn't you create an index in MySQL/postgres?
    - Xylakant 6y ago
      > If an index is missing for you query pattern, wouldn't you create an index in MySQL/postgres? No. I’d consider adding an index. An index is not free, it comes at a cost and that cost may well be higher than the costs of not having that index. For example, if a reporting query that runs once every few hours is lacking an index, the cost of updating that index on every write (and the disk space/memory used) may well exceed its benefits.
      - lmm 6y ago
        Secondary indicies can be a lot cheaper in a non-ACID database, where you can acknowledge a write when it is durably committed but index updates may not have completed.
      - squeaky-clean 6y ago
        Exactly this. If you connect to your database and run a couple un-indexed queries to explore your data, any query which takes over 100ms will appear for the next 30 days in the "Performance Advisor" tab and it will offer you indexes to create targeted at that query. Just based on a query you did manually one time. Just to note, this is referring to the features for a hosted databased on cloud.mongodb.com, and not something built into MongoDB the database.
        neeleshs 6y ago
        I prefer this being shown in the slow queries over not showing it at all , from my experience from people running bad queries manually on production MySQL instances and starting a domino effect. I guess to each their own.
      - neeleshs 6y ago
        Agreed, but a notification about a potential performance issue is not forcing anyone to add an index.
    - Too 6y ago
      MSSQL can automatically create indexes for frequently run queries, instead of sending emails about it.
    - vosper 6y ago
      My claim isn’t that indexes are a bad idea. The comment I replied to suggested that Mongo’s marketing targets people who don’t want to learn how to use indexes; my claim is that the reality of the hosted product is that it frequently suggests that you add indexes (presumably doing so helps with Mongo Corps hosting margins, as well as with performance [which is laughable even with indexes])
      - squeaky-clean 6y ago
        > my claim is that the reality of the hosted product is that it frequently suggests that you add indexes But it auto-suggests what index to use and has a button for you to immediately apply it. I'd say it definitely intends for you to avoid learning how indexes in MongoDB work. The index suggestions it makes are often terrible. > performance [which is laughable even with indexes] It really depends on your use-case and how you can structure and query your data. For one such service I'm the lead on I haven't found anything faster that doesn't sacrifice the ability to do more generic queries when we occasionally need to. (Yes we've benchmarked against postgres json fields which is always everyone's first suggestion)
        vosper 6y ago
        > But it auto-suggests what index to use and has a button for you to immediately apply it. I'd say it definitely intends for you to avoid learning how indexes in MongoDB work. The index suggestions it makes are often terrible. Heh, yeah, you're right. So I guess it's the worst of both worlds: they try to not have you learn about indexes, but they give you terrible index suggestions, so when those don't work out you still end up having to learn about indexes :)
- mikekchar 6y ago
  I have a legacy app that uses CouchDB under the hood. It's not actually appropriate for how it's being used, but I can see how it could be used in an appropriate way. Over time I got to respect and even like CouchDB (just not the way we're using it ;-) ). However before CouchDB apparently we started with MongoDB and then migrated to Couch after problems with data integrity in Mongo (this was a long time ago and I've heard that problems that we had have been fixed). But I've always been curious: as a person who like MongoDB, do you have an opinion about Mongo vs. Couch? Keep in mind that you don't have do convince me that there are niches where that style of DB is appropriate ;-) I'm mostly just interested in the comparison since I've never spent any time looking at MongoDB.
  - squeaky-clean 6y ago
    IMO, MongoDB is really good if all your indexes and your data (after sharding) can fit in memory, and you need queries that are a simple match query against a small number of keys or a range query against a date or float type. And also your data doesn't fit into a row/column structure very easily (otherwise go SQL). The aggregation framework, joins, other features are all nice to have for occasional use, but you can't be doing those 10k times a second. It's great for things like a realtime layer of some app that merges data with a slower and more historical layer of data running on a SQL engine or something safer. Or for services that provide realtime or recent-time analytics, while storing your historical data somewhere else (see any patterns here so far? :P ). In my case the main usage is for an advertising bid and content serving engine, which was pretty much the ideal example use-case for MongoDB mentioned in books I read years ago when first learning it. Just to note, yes the data integrity problems are "fixed", but only if you configure your instances properly and your read and write statements properly. It's not terribly hard to do, but I don't know if I would really go recommending MongoDB for newbies. If you know how to configure it properly for your data-safety needs, and would benefit from being able to have a flexible schema in early development.... I'd still maybe suggest looking at other document DBs unless you need the read/write speed Mongo can give on simple queries (and fresh projects probably do not need that)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Thaxll 6y ago
Because good engineers don't take for granted what's written on HN and do a thorough evaluation of a product, MongoDB or something else.
- robterrell 6y ago
  If there's a more thorough evaluation than Jepsen, please let me know.
wolco 6y ago
I like it as in certain situations. For situations where you don't know the schema or for different schemas per record mongo is a great place to dump. For data when you care about speed and don't care about losing some data. Think sending back a game screen when the client moves and requires a redraw. Depending on how fast the screen is changing dropping a screen isn't the biggest deal. Reporting was a little bit more difficult but somehow rewarding.
MildlySerious 6y ago
Marketing and advertising. They do a lot of it, trying to brand themselves as the core of the modern stack. The same thing they have been doing from the very beginning, when they had no product to back their claims. Reading the comments here, little seems to have changed.

Nobody seems to like it. Someone has any idea on why the company still has their revenue increasing ?

by polote 6y ago

Nobody seems to like it. Someone has any idea on why the company still has their revenue increasing ?

I like it, but I don't really really chime in on threads where it's mostly Mongo bashing and jokes, and I'm guessing others who like MongoDB do the same. But I'd think MongoDB the company increasing in revenue isn't totally related to the quality of MongoDB the database. In fact a lot of their products seem to be targeting the "I don't want to learn how to set it up and understand indexes" crowd.

vosper 6y ago
Which is funny because one of the things hosted Mongo will do is constantly send you automated emails suggesting that you should create indexes (for tables that MySQL or Postgres would laugh at)
- neeleshs 6y ago
  Sends emails when scanned vs returned record ratio is greater than a threshold. Not quite sure how something like this would be different for MySQL/postgres. If an index is missing for you query pattern, wouldn't you create an index in MySQL/postgres?
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    > If an index is missing for you query pattern, wouldn't you create an index in MySQL/postgres? No. I’d consider adding an index. An index is not free, it comes at a cost and that cost may well be higher than the costs of not having that index. For example, if a reporting query that runs once every few hours is lacking an index, the cost of updating that index on every write (and the disk space/memory used) may well exceed its benefits.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Secondary indicies can be a lot cheaper in a non-ACID database, where you can acknowledge a write when it is durably committed but index updates may not have completed.
    - squeaky-clean 6y ago
      Exactly this. If you connect to your database and run a couple un-indexed queries to explore your data, any query which takes over 100ms will appear for the next 30 days in the "Performance Advisor" tab and it will offer you indexes to create targeted at that query. Just based on a query you did manually one time. Just to note, this is referring to the features for a hosted databased on cloud.mongodb.com, and not something built into MongoDB the database.
      - neeleshs 6y ago
        I prefer this being shown in the slow queries over not showing it at all , from my experience from people running bad queries manually on production MySQL instances and starting a domino effect. I guess to each their own.
    - neeleshs 6y ago
      Agreed, but a notification about a potential performance issue is not forcing anyone to add an index.
  - Too 6y ago
    MSSQL can automatically create indexes for frequently run queries, instead of sending emails about it.
  - vosper 6y ago
    My claim isn’t that indexes are a bad idea. The comment I replied to suggested that Mongo’s marketing targets people who don’t want to learn how to use indexes; my claim is that the reality of the hosted product is that it frequently suggests that you add indexes (presumably doing so helps with Mongo Corps hosting margins, as well as with performance [which is laughable even with indexes])
    - squeaky-clean 6y ago
      > my claim is that the reality of the hosted product is that it frequently suggests that you add indexes But it auto-suggests what index to use and has a button for you to immediately apply it. I'd say it definitely intends for you to avoid learning how indexes in MongoDB work. The index suggestions it makes are often terrible. > performance [which is laughable even with indexes] It really depends on your use-case and how you can structure and query your data. For one such service I'm the lead on I haven't found anything faster that doesn't sacrifice the ability to do more generic queries when we occasionally need to. (Yes we've benchmarked against postgres json fields which is always everyone's first suggestion)
      - vosper 6y ago
        > But it auto-suggests what index to use and has a button for you to immediately apply it. I'd say it definitely intends for you to avoid learning how indexes in MongoDB work. The index suggestions it makes are often terrible. Heh, yeah, you're right. So I guess it's the worst of both worlds: they try to not have you learn about indexes, but they give you terrible index suggestions, so when those don't work out you still end up having to learn about indexes :)
mikekchar 6y ago
I have a legacy app that uses CouchDB under the hood. It's not actually appropriate for how it's being used, but I can see how it could be used in an appropriate way. Over time I got to respect and even like CouchDB (just not the way we're using it ;-) ). However before CouchDB apparently we started with MongoDB and then migrated to Couch after problems with data integrity in Mongo (this was a long time ago and I've heard that problems that we had have been fixed). But I've always been curious: as a person who like MongoDB, do you have an opinion about Mongo vs. Couch? Keep in mind that you don't have do convince me that there are niches where that style of DB is appropriate ;-) I'm mostly just interested in the comparison since I've never spent any time looking at MongoDB.
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  IMO, MongoDB is really good if all your indexes and your data (after sharding) can fit in memory, and you need queries that are a simple match query against a small number of keys or a range query against a date or float type. And also your data doesn't fit into a row/column structure very easily (otherwise go SQL). The aggregation framework, joins, other features are all nice to have for occasional use, but you can't be doing those 10k times a second. It's great for things like a realtime layer of some app that merges data with a slower and more historical layer of data running on a SQL engine or something safer. Or for services that provide realtime or recent-time analytics, while storing your historical data somewhere else (see any patterns here so far? :P ). In my case the main usage is for an advertising bid and content serving engine, which was pretty much the ideal example use-case for MongoDB mentioned in books I read years ago when first learning it. Just to note, yes the data integrity problems are "fixed", but only if you configure your instances properly and your read and write statements properly. It's not terribly hard to do, but I don't know if I would really go recommending MongoDB for newbies. If you know how to configure it properly for your data-safety needs, and would benefit from being able to have a flexible schema in early development.... I'd still maybe suggest looking at other document DBs unless you need the read/write speed Mongo can give on simple queries (and fresh projects probably do not need that)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Thaxll 6y ago

Because good engineers don't take for granted what's written on HN and do a thorough evaluation of a product, MongoDB or something else.

robterrell 6y ago
If there's a more thorough evaluation than Jepsen, please let me know.

wolco 6y ago

I like it as in certain situations. For situations where you don't know the schema or for different schemas per record mongo is a great place to dump. For data when you care about speed and don't care about losing some data. Think sending back a game screen when the client moves and requires a redraw. Depending on how fast the screen is changing dropping a screen isn't the biggest deal. Reporting was a little bit more difficult but somehow rewarding.

MildlySerious 6y ago

Marketing and advertising. They do a lot of it, trying to brand themselves as the core of the modern stack. The same thing they have been doing from the very beginning, when they had no product to back their claims. Reading the comments here, little seems to have changed.