4 ms·

I suspect the reason that Mongo attracts so much hate is that it's more heavily marketed/evangelised than other NoSQL DBs - so more in the public eye and people

I suspect the reason that Mongo attracts so much hate is that it's more heavily marketed/evangelised than other NoSQL DBs - so more in the public eye and people expect more from it. Since the reality is that Mongo is not yet a technically strong product (regardless of its merits in terms of ease of use and getting simple things done quickly), it's bound to attract more negative attention.

davidw 13y ago
Bingo. My brief experience with Mongo a few years ago was in a situation where it got selected in order to use something "new and cool". My job was to produce some reports from the data. Guess what reports require? Joins. The whole mess was slow and sucked, and the client belatedly realized that MongoDB was a shitty choice for what they needed, which could have been handled by Postgres without breaking a sweat.
nasalgoat 13y ago
Having spent the last two years trying to make MongoDB work at large scale and only succeeding because I have a ton of resources (200+ db hosts), I can say it's more than just the spotlight. It is a fundamentally broken product.
- AlisdairO 13y ago
  Fair enough - I have no direct personal experience with Mongo myself. Coming from a more traditional DB background, what I've read indicates it has a lot of technological flaws, but I didn't want to be too harsh in my judgement without personal experience. For my own curiosity, what issues caused you the most trouble? The lack of transactions combined with the extremely coarse grained write locking were what put me off the most.
  - nasalgoat 13y ago
    Read performance compared to a lot of other offerings is a significant issue. However, one of the biggest issue is the entire sharding design that is incredibly delicate and wouldn't pass even the most basic high availability requirements. I could go into a lot of detail about why it's bad but it would take too long. After that, it's the hardcoded limitations that prevent true multi-datacentre sharding, the previously mentioned CPU issues with mongos, broken replica selection, inability to control primary/replica setting manually, etc. The list is virtually endless.

davidw 13y ago

Bingo. My brief experience with Mongo a few years ago was in a situation where it got selected in order to use something "new and cool". My job was to produce some reports from the data. Guess what reports require? Joins. The whole mess was slow and sucked, and the client belatedly realized that MongoDB was a shitty choice for what they needed, which could have been handled by Postgres without breaking a sweat.

nasalgoat 13y ago

Having spent the last two years trying to make MongoDB work at large scale and only succeeding because I have a ton of resources (200+ db hosts), I can say it's more than just the spotlight. It is a fundamentally broken product.

AlisdairO 13y ago
Fair enough - I have no direct personal experience with Mongo myself. Coming from a more traditional DB background, what I've read indicates it has a lot of technological flaws, but I didn't want to be too harsh in my judgement without personal experience. For my own curiosity, what issues caused you the most trouble? The lack of transactions combined with the extremely coarse grained write locking were what put me off the most.
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  Read performance compared to a lot of other offerings is a significant issue. However, one of the biggest issue is the entire sharding design that is incredibly delicate and wouldn't pass even the most basic high availability requirements. I could go into a lot of detail about why it's bad but it would take too long. After that, it's the hardcoded limitations that prevent true multi-datacentre sharding, the previously mentioned CPU issues with mongos, broken replica selection, inability to control primary/replica setting manually, etc. The list is virtually endless.