3 ms·

If you allow invalid records and multiple versions of a schema in a collection, you will forever being paying for that mistake every time you read from the data

• lmm 5y ago
  If you're fine with just dropping that invalid data, you can always just delete it at any point in the future. (Yes, that should horrify you - but so should the idea of just erroring and dropping it when someone first tried to write it, which is what an RDBMS would do). The overall effect is the same either way. Fixing up data that was written wrongly takes work, there's no getting away from that. But if you have a record of the original write attempt then at least you can do that work and recover the data (if you decide the cost/benefit is worth it). Whereas if you have the datastore reject it at write time then you're SOL before you've even started.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    > Yes, that should horrify you - but so should the idea of just erroring and dropping it when someone first tried to write it, which is what an RDBMS would do Have you ever actually encountered any RDBMS that just silently "drops" your write without informing you, or is this just how you think they work? Otherwise, isn't this just like any other data write erroring out -- MongoDB driver saying "Service down!", simple flat-file write saying "Disk full!", etc -- in that if your app doesn't react to this, it's not the data store but your code that sucks?