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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

MongoDB made some very sketchy, undocumented (or poorly documented) technical decisions in its early years that placed data at great risk.

It's better now, but very few things worry technical people more than a database that loses data. It's hard to get past that early impression.

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early?

> This interpretation hinges on interpreting successful sub-majority writes as not necessarily successful: rather, a successful response is merely a suggestion that the write has probably occurred, or might later occur, or perhaps will occur, be visible to some clients, then un-occur, or perhaps nothing will happen whatsoever.

> We note that this remains MongoDB's default level of write safety.

- http://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-6-4

So a user selects the write safety level they wish. Ok.

Then again, so did MySQL. Do you remember the MySQL 3.x "MyISAM" days? No transactions, automatic truncation and type conversions, etc...

...and a significant portion of IT people still distrust MySQL.

... or they love it, like uber

MySQL still has some unsafe behaviours. Even if it were to fix them all, I still wouldn't use it or recommend it, on account of finding it difficult-to-impossible to trust the design and engineering behind it.

MySQL was very upfront about it, though. They always said that if you wanted that stuff, there are real RDBMS for that.

Quite easy, actually. Those that started using MongoDB in the last 5 years had little bias or negative experience, and are generally happy users.

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