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Database system combining two published technologies battle-tested by two of the largest Internet websites performs better under real world conditions than data

Database system combining two published technologies battle-tested by two of the largest Internet websites performs better under real world conditions than database written by amateurs, news at 11! (In all seriousness, what did they expect? Have they looked at the MongoDB code? Do they seriously believe that the 10gen folks are smarter or better at solving problems than the masses of engineers Google and Amazon have thrown at this problem?)

jbellis 14y ago
I appreciate the sentiment, but it's worth distinguishing between the design and implementation here. Cassandra does take a lot of inspiration from the Bigtable and Dynamo papers, so we benefit from the thinking of a handful of very smart engineers at Google and Amazon, respectively, but the actual code is our [Apache's] own and for the battle testing you need to thank companies like Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and others. [1] That said, part of the reason Cassandra was attractive to me from the beginning is that unlike master-slave designs like MongoDB (or Bigtable/HBase, for that matter), a p2p design doesn't have the many corner cases around failover and recovery that complicate troubleshooting so badly. This is a primary reason Cassandra has had a very good reliability story since very early on. [1] http://www.datastax.com/cassandrausers http://www.datastax.com/cassandrausers
- jemfinch 14y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Google or Amazon engineers implemented Cassandra (though it's notable, of course, that it was initially implemented by Facebook, adding a third Internet behemoth to its pedigree). What I really meant to say is that it's clear that the engineers behind Cassandra have done their research and chosen an extremely well tested design, while the engineers behind MongoDB seem to be completely winging it, ignorant of the literature and writing (based on my last examination) extremely amateurish code.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
est 14y ago
argumentum ad verecundiam
- jemfinch 14y ago
  You're confusing evidence with authority and shrouding it in Latin in an attempt to appear erudite.
  - est 14y ago
    Your evidence is > Amazon, Google, Facebook throw mass engineers at problems Cassandra has overlapped with. > There for, Cassandra is better than "database written by amateurs" If you have hard evidence post the fucking evidence.
    - jemfinch 14y ago
      Stop selectively reading through your ideological lens. My evidence is "the technology that Cassandra uses"--that is, the SSTable/BigTable storage format and the Amazon Dynamo eventual consistency and distribution model--has been not only peer reviewed and published, but has been serving for years as the foundation of two of the busiest Internet websites in the world. That's real world experience orders of magnitude more extensive and robust than the anything MongoDB can offer.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]

jbellis 14y ago

I appreciate the sentiment, but it's worth distinguishing between the design and implementation here. Cassandra does take a lot of inspiration from the Bigtable and Dynamo papers, so we benefit from the thinking of a handful of very smart engineers at Google and Amazon, respectively, but the actual code is our [Apache's] own and for the battle testing you need to thank companies like Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and others. [1] That said, part of the reason Cassandra was attractive to me from the beginning is that unlike master-slave designs like MongoDB (or Bigtable/HBase, for that matter), a p2p design doesn't have the many corner cases around failover and recovery that complicate troubleshooting so badly. This is a primary reason Cassandra has had a very good reliability story since very early on. [1] http://www.datastax.com/cassandrausers http://www.datastax.com/cassandrausers

jemfinch 14y ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Google or Amazon engineers implemented Cassandra (though it's notable, of course, that it was initially implemented by Facebook, adding a third Internet behemoth to its pedigree). What I really meant to say is that it's clear that the engineers behind Cassandra have done their research and chosen an extremely well tested design, while the engineers behind MongoDB seem to be completely winging it, ignorant of the literature and writing (based on my last examination) extremely amateurish code.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

est 14y ago

argumentum ad verecundiam

jemfinch 14y ago
You're confusing evidence with authority and shrouding it in Latin in an attempt to appear erudite.
- est 14y ago
  Your evidence is > Amazon, Google, Facebook throw mass engineers at problems Cassandra has overlapped with. > There for, Cassandra is better than "database written by amateurs" If you have hard evidence post the fucking evidence.
  - jemfinch 14y ago
    Stop selectively reading through your ideological lens. My evidence is "the technology that Cassandra uses"--that is, the SSTable/BigTable storage format and the Amazon Dynamo eventual consistency and distribution model--has been not only peer reviewed and published, but has been serving for years as the foundation of two of the busiest Internet websites in the world. That's real world experience orders of magnitude more extensive and robust than the anything MongoDB can offer.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]