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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

As I saw the tweet I became uneasy, followed the link and, sure enough, it's my post he's referencing. That's a bit disconcerting, I feel responsible for trashing MongoDB all over the internet. At least my conscience is lighter because everything I wrote was true...

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For pete's sake, for the last time: you were using 1.3.3 which is UNstable and not production ready. Its developers know it's likely to have problems and you proved them right. What you wrote was not "true". You found a bug in beta software.

This instance of CouchDB data corruption is in a production-ready version, aka a stable version. No doubt eventually MongoDB will hit a similar issue and then we'll all calm down and stop poo-pooing all the hard work everyone is putting in building these databases.

For the zillionth time: I moved to 1.4.0 after 1.3.3, and there was data loss on the stable version too. Seriously, what's up with everyone's reading comprehension?

My understanding is that you stopped using MongoDB and started using SQLite. To me, that means that you are probably not a Linux or Mac or Windows user because they all can crash and lose your data. Likewise you are not a user of any office suite because you've likely to lose data from all of them. Likewise, even ISPs can disconnect you half-way through a transaction (say buying something or editing a blog post) and so you will stop using them because of that.

So good luck with historious. I think it's an interesting idea, but by your logic I shouldn't try it in case it crashes and loses my bookmarking data.

I'm pretty sure that my wariness of losing data would mean that I'm... uh... less likely to lose data? Besides, SQLite is amazing.

Yes, it was true that the 32bit version of mongodb that is limited to 2gb would lose your data if you injected more than 2gb in it, shame on mongodb...

Jesus, I can't believe people still defend this shit. I don't care if MongoDB can store ten jiggerbytes, it should give an error when you're trying to insert more than that. When the hell did corrupting your data become acceptable for a datastore?

Simple guide to keep your integrity in the software business: don't crap on other peoples products and admit your own mistakes.

I'm confused, are you talking about me or MongoDB? If you're talking about me, I don't think I made a mistake, and if you're talking about MongoDB, the guys on IRC were very civil about it and did say that silently corrupting data was the wrong way to go about it.

It's these apologists who are giving MongoDB a bad name, really, because the guys on IRC were nothing but helpful about it.

Sorry, this should have posted this under the Katz tweet link. My bad.

Oh, that makes sense then, thanks for clarifying...

The 32bit version is available for convenience, nobody uses it in prod. You can't complain that a simple testing tool limited to 2gb can't store more than 2gb.

When did I complain it couldn't store more than 2 GB? I complained because it silently corrupted my data.

You used a dev version of a tool that is not meant to be ran in production or for any serious task and then complained it didn't work with your attempt. As this bug is not present in the real prod version of mongodb, it doesn't make sense to criticize mongodb for it. Also next time RTFM before using a tool you don't know much about.

I feel this is a justifiable defense, if you use a pre-release version of anything you should recognize that you are taking a risk.

The 32-bit stable versions have the same behaviour, and the MongoDB guys on IRC did admit that data corruption is not a very elegant way to handle it.

unless you run on EC2 and don't need a large instance (which is where 64 bit starts)

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