Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I have first-hand experience with MongoDB silently eating my data (yes, I was using the 64-bit version) which I realized a week earlier when I noticed half the dataset missing.

The reputation (specifically of Mongo) is probably not undeserved.

View on HN

I am not knowledgeable of your situation, but I am curious about your set up, the intentions you had when you were storing things and other factors in MongoDB not storing your data. Also, I am curious how long ago this was...what version of MongoDB you were using and if you were checking getLastError after the write (assuming you wanted that behavior).

I am not denying your experience, just curious about the whole picture.

I have a writeup here:

http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/using-mongodb-for-great-sc...

Given that you didn't know better than to not use 1.3.* initially I find it hard to take your continued propagation of your posts on MongoDB seriously.

Yep, that pretty much invalidates the fact that the stable version of Mongo silently corrupted data.

If only we could make database software that didn't hold grudges!

If it's common knowledge not to use 1.3.*, why isn't that anywhere on the first page of google when searching for mongodb or mongodb 1.3?

Just curious what the magic incantation is for this information.

I really don't see how you couldn't replace MongoDB in that post with any other database and still be presented with the same issues: - adding indexes slows writes down and increases memory requirements - running queries with poor / no indexes will cause you to have I/O constraints and an unhappy CPU - it seems like your data set was better suited for a graph db like neo4j than a document db or RDBMS.

As for the data corruption, I didnt see you mention if you were checking for a response on saves or not.

I think the problems you experienced were due much more to the fact that you apparently had more data than the machine could handle, not necessarily the database engine used.

MongoDB, the "blame the user" database

See the subsequent writeup on SQLite and how it handled the same dataset magnificently. About the checking of responses, if you read the article you will see that previously stored data just went away, it wasn't failure to store outright.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com