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> Another way of handling this is defining a schema in your models. For example, Mongoid, a popular MongoDB ODM for Ruby, lets you do just that. However, when d

> Another way of handling this is defining a schema in your models. For example, Mongoid, a popular MongoDB ODM for Ruby, lets you do just that. However, when defining a schema using such tools one should wonder why they aren’t defining the schema in the database itself. Bah. It's like they didn't know that schema-free data stores mean "there is no schema; different objects may have different fields". This is the whole point of MongoDB: you assume the responsibility of managing the schema. That's a "feature": you get greater flexibility by assuming more responsibility. Whether it's a useful feature, I won't say. Their second reason is much more valid: MongoDB is not consistent/durable, all that. It's good for a cache, but not for long term data. Here's a third reason I'd give against it as your primary data store: it's expensive. You have to keep your entire dataset in RAM, but that's not always necessary. My favorite example is from Foursquare. They had every single check-in ever in MongoDB in RAM. That's absolutely unnecessary, and quite silly to do so. Old check-ins are archived data. You don't need them. No user ever wants to know when/where they checked in three years ago. This is why at the time they were paying for 68 GB RAM Amazon boxes instead of 4-8 GB boxes. (I have no idea what they do now. I remember chatting with them on HN after a catastrophic out of memory failure when they filled up the entire 68 GB's).

colinhowe 12y ago
We have a dataset much larger than RAM (600gb vs 60gb RAM). It's the working set that really matters. Accessing data outside the working set can be slow - unless you have SSDs :) Regarding consistent/durable: during the past four years, we've not had any problems on this front that weren't caused by us in. We've had an issue that was a misconfiguration on our part where we allowed writes to a server because we pulled it out of a replica set. We also ran out of space on the logging volume once and that caused downtime - but, we didn't have log rotation or anything setup. In general, we've found the failover very reliable and new primaries have come online without any problems. That said, schemaless is both a blessing and a curse. Now that Postgres and MySQL have online alter built-in I'd possibly choose one of them if we were starting everything again.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Well, SSD's aren't nearly as fast as RAM, even today. I think we are in agreement about the working data vs all data. I am saying that in most applications your working dataset is much smaller than your total data set. So why pay for hardware capable of holding your entire dataset in RAM when you don't need it? I am surprised you are able to do this with Mongo. Last I checked, it simply did not handle this case, and started failing miserably if it was not able to fit all data into RAM. Re: durability: I am not talking about the server going down, coming back up. I am talking about whether there is an fsync() when writing data. Set up a test case where you are writing data very rapidly to MongoDB, then pull the plug on the box it's running on. It'll come back up, but the data it told you it just wrote won't be there because it didn't checkpoint. Did you check that all your writes succeeded when you had node failures in your cluster? Most applications don't have the machinery to do this because generally the state necessary to check this is stored in the database, yet it's the database you are testing. The only way to test this is to also write logs (also atomically), and then verify DB data against logs. Or, just use a database that guarantees durability. Re: consistency: MongoDB doesn't support transactions [1]. That's enough to exclude it from a large number of applications. Anything to do with money, for example, is out since you really don't want double spending to be a thing. [1] http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/write-operations-atomicity/ http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/write-operations-atomici...
  - colinhowe 12y ago
    Fair points - we don't allow failed servers back into replica sets and rely on writing to multiple nodes instead of the disk as source of truth. This may not suit everyone and absolutely does not suit financial transactions. You can bend Mongo to do it using additional collections and money movement logs... but, why bother when it's simpler to use MySQL/Postgres?
jrochkind1 12y ago
> This is the whole point of MongoDB: you assume the responsibility of managing the schema Who/what is the 'you' there? Don't 'you' have the responsibility of managing the schema either way? It's a question of whether you want to manage the schema through an rdbms, or... just in your application logic, I guess?
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Manage as in write all the code that ensures adherence to the schema. If you say that the field called "score" is an int in a schema-ful DB, then insert an array, the DB will throw an error. If you do that in a schema-less DB, it will not unless you add a check yourself. If you are not using some type of unified DB access layer, you must perform this check every time you write a value. You must also perform the check every time you read a value, since someone else might have written something different to the DB while you weren't looking. This you take on doing much more work, yet gain flexibility and possibly some space savings (as in, you are not storing empty cells if you don't want to).
  - zrail 12y ago
    (solely toward your final point) Many RDBMS' will optimize that for you. PostgreSQL has a bitmap structure on each row that indicates which columns are null and which have data in them. In addition, it automatically compresses certain data types. For example, strings that overflow to the point where they need to be stored in a secondary table (called "toast" in pg) will be automatically compressed.
    - IgorPartola 12y ago
      That's pretty cool. I didn't know Postgres actually did this, though I figured it was at least possible.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    > Manage as in write all the code that ensures adherence to the schema... ...This you take on doing much more work, yet gain flexibility The flexibility you gain seems to mostly be... the flexibility to choose not to ensure adherence to the schema. Which may be a valid choice in some cases, but I suspect a lot of people don't quite realize they are making it let alone analyze whether it is the right choice for them, and come to regret it.
pico303 12y ago
I'm not a fan of MongoDB, but you don't know what you're talking about. MongoDB is durable. While it doesn't quite support SQL transactions, it is durable. The data is journaled before being confirmed, and once confirmed will be written to disk. It can be consistent, but this sort of breaks the whole idea of scaling and distributing the load in Mongo, or causes massive performance problems, so that is something to consider when using it. Understanding and adopting eventual consistency is tough, but it's an issue with every distributed database, not just MongoDB. And you don't "keep your entire data set in memory". You should make sure your indexes fit in memory. Your data can be as large as you like. Most people with terabytes of data in MongoDB don't keep terabytes of RAM in their servers. Foursquare did NOT keep every single check-in in RAM. They kept an index of them in RAM, sure. But the problem was they had a sharded MongoDB deployment and one of the shards became unbalanced and exceeded the available RAM. If that happens (harder to do these days, but not impossible), it can be very difficult to recover. MongoDB tries to bridge that gap between NoSQL and SQL. I think the MongoDB folks originally ignored decades of database research when developing MongoDB, but they've been forced to adopt it as the years have passed. Is it an Oracle killer? No. But it can be a useful and productive tool if you understand and apply it appropriately.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Please read the first answer to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18488209/does-mongodb-journaling-guarantee-durability http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18488209/does-mongodb-jou... before assuming that the MongoDB journal is durable. It comes down to this: there is no way to tell MongoDB to commit a write and not return until it is durable. You can tell it to fsync() it within at most 33 ms or so from when it returns, but not immediately. There is no control in it to say "fsync() this value because it is important, then return". That is not as durable as other database engines, which do this based on number of commits that have not been fsynced to the journal (this value can be set to 1 causing every commit to be fsynced). Consistency is a large topic, and I am sorry I mentioned it vs something more specific, such as: MongoDB doesn't have transactions, so you can't make multiple updates truly atomic. That's annoying at least, and unusable at most. Two phase commits let you get about 50% there, but with no rollback your application code has to implement rollbacks. In lots of scenarios your application is not smart enough to rollback a "transaction", so your data will be screwed. Eventual consistency is starting to come under fire precisely because it avoids the hard problem of database design and is offloading it on the application developer, who is typically not as versed in how to create a system where temporary inconsistencies are OK. At best, it means that the developer is now wasting productivity on addressing consistency issues. You may be right about Foursquare keeping only an index of all the check-ins, not the entire dataset. The main point remains: why keep essentially archived data in RAM? MongoDB does not let you keep a partial index. MongoDB tries to give up basic datastore guarantees to gain speed and flexibility. Once again, I am not arguing that it's a useless tool. It is useful. As a cache. Or in cases where data loss is acceptable. It is much less useful in cases where dataloss is catastrophic, such as financial transactions. It will also be much more expensive at scale, whereas other datastores optimize for the conditions where RAM is expensive and disk is cheap. You can still run into this case when you are talking about a terabytes to petabytes of data.

colinhowe 12y ago

We have a dataset much larger than RAM (600gb vs 60gb RAM). It's the working set that really matters. Accessing data outside the working set can be slow - unless you have SSDs :) Regarding consistent/durable: during the past four years, we've not had any problems on this front that weren't caused by us in. We've had an issue that was a misconfiguration on our part where we allowed writes to a server because we pulled it out of a replica set. We also ran out of space on the logging volume once and that caused downtime - but, we didn't have log rotation or anything setup. In general, we've found the failover very reliable and new primaries have come online without any problems. That said, schemaless is both a blessing and a curse. Now that Postgres and MySQL have online alter built-in I'd possibly choose one of them if we were starting everything again.

IgorPartola 12y ago
Well, SSD's aren't nearly as fast as RAM, even today. I think we are in agreement about the working data vs all data. I am saying that in most applications your working dataset is much smaller than your total data set. So why pay for hardware capable of holding your entire dataset in RAM when you don't need it? I am surprised you are able to do this with Mongo. Last I checked, it simply did not handle this case, and started failing miserably if it was not able to fit all data into RAM. Re: durability: I am not talking about the server going down, coming back up. I am talking about whether there is an fsync() when writing data. Set up a test case where you are writing data very rapidly to MongoDB, then pull the plug on the box it's running on. It'll come back up, but the data it told you it just wrote won't be there because it didn't checkpoint. Did you check that all your writes succeeded when you had node failures in your cluster? Most applications don't have the machinery to do this because generally the state necessary to check this is stored in the database, yet it's the database you are testing. The only way to test this is to also write logs (also atomically), and then verify DB data against logs. Or, just use a database that guarantees durability. Re: consistency: MongoDB doesn't support transactions [1]. That's enough to exclude it from a large number of applications. Anything to do with money, for example, is out since you really don't want double spending to be a thing. [1] http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/write-operations-atomicity/ http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/write-operations-atomici...
- colinhowe 12y ago
  Fair points - we don't allow failed servers back into replica sets and rely on writing to multiple nodes instead of the disk as source of truth. This may not suit everyone and absolutely does not suit financial transactions. You can bend Mongo to do it using additional collections and money movement logs... but, why bother when it's simpler to use MySQL/Postgres?

jrochkind1 12y ago

> This is the whole point of MongoDB: you assume the responsibility of managing the schema Who/what is the 'you' there? Don't 'you' have the responsibility of managing the schema either way? It's a question of whether you want to manage the schema through an rdbms, or... just in your application logic, I guess?

IgorPartola 12y ago
Manage as in write all the code that ensures adherence to the schema. If you say that the field called "score" is an int in a schema-ful DB, then insert an array, the DB will throw an error. If you do that in a schema-less DB, it will not unless you add a check yourself. If you are not using some type of unified DB access layer, you must perform this check every time you write a value. You must also perform the check every time you read a value, since someone else might have written something different to the DB while you weren't looking. This you take on doing much more work, yet gain flexibility and possibly some space savings (as in, you are not storing empty cells if you don't want to).
- zrail 12y ago
  (solely toward your final point) Many RDBMS' will optimize that for you. PostgreSQL has a bitmap structure on each row that indicates which columns are null and which have data in them. In addition, it automatically compresses certain data types. For example, strings that overflow to the point where they need to be stored in a secondary table (called "toast" in pg) will be automatically compressed.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    That's pretty cool. I didn't know Postgres actually did this, though I figured it was at least possible.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  > Manage as in write all the code that ensures adherence to the schema... ...This you take on doing much more work, yet gain flexibility The flexibility you gain seems to mostly be... the flexibility to choose not to ensure adherence to the schema. Which may be a valid choice in some cases, but I suspect a lot of people don't quite realize they are making it let alone analyze whether it is the right choice for them, and come to regret it.

pico303 12y ago

I'm not a fan of MongoDB, but you don't know what you're talking about. MongoDB is durable. While it doesn't quite support SQL transactions, it is durable. The data is journaled before being confirmed, and once confirmed will be written to disk. It can be consistent, but this sort of breaks the whole idea of scaling and distributing the load in Mongo, or causes massive performance problems, so that is something to consider when using it. Understanding and adopting eventual consistency is tough, but it's an issue with every distributed database, not just MongoDB. And you don't "keep your entire data set in memory". You should make sure your indexes fit in memory. Your data can be as large as you like. Most people with terabytes of data in MongoDB don't keep terabytes of RAM in their servers. Foursquare did NOT keep every single check-in in RAM. They kept an index of them in RAM, sure. But the problem was they had a sharded MongoDB deployment and one of the shards became unbalanced and exceeded the available RAM. If that happens (harder to do these days, but not impossible), it can be very difficult to recover. MongoDB tries to bridge that gap between NoSQL and SQL. I think the MongoDB folks originally ignored decades of database research when developing MongoDB, but they've been forced to adopt it as the years have passed. Is it an Oracle killer? No. But it can be a useful and productive tool if you understand and apply it appropriately.

IgorPartola 12y ago
Please read the first answer to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18488209/does-mongodb-journaling-guarantee-durability http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18488209/does-mongodb-jou... before assuming that the MongoDB journal is durable. It comes down to this: there is no way to tell MongoDB to commit a write and not return until it is durable. You can tell it to fsync() it within at most 33 ms or so from when it returns, but not immediately. There is no control in it to say "fsync() this value because it is important, then return". That is not as durable as other database engines, which do this based on number of commits that have not been fsynced to the journal (this value can be set to 1 causing every commit to be fsynced). Consistency is a large topic, and I am sorry I mentioned it vs something more specific, such as: MongoDB doesn't have transactions, so you can't make multiple updates truly atomic. That's annoying at least, and unusable at most. Two phase commits let you get about 50% there, but with no rollback your application code has to implement rollbacks. In lots of scenarios your application is not smart enough to rollback a "transaction", so your data will be screwed. Eventual consistency is starting to come under fire precisely because it avoids the hard problem of database design and is offloading it on the application developer, who is typically not as versed in how to create a system where temporary inconsistencies are OK. At best, it means that the developer is now wasting productivity on addressing consistency issues. You may be right about Foursquare keeping only an index of all the check-ins, not the entire dataset. The main point remains: why keep essentially archived data in RAM? MongoDB does not let you keep a partial index. MongoDB tries to give up basic datastore guarantees to gain speed and flexibility. Once again, I am not arguing that it's a useless tool. It is useful. As a cache. Or in cases where data loss is acceptable. It is much less useful in cases where dataloss is catastrophic, such as financial transactions. It will also be much more expensive at scale, whereas other datastores optimize for the conditions where RAM is expensive and disk is cheap. You can still run into this case when you are talking about a terabytes to petabytes of data.