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Comment by vailripper | Hacker News Reader

I was quite impressed with how MongoDB handled everything. They were quick to respond in an intelligent (read: not hot air) manner, admitted that their product still has some shortcomings that they're working on. I wish more companies were as honest.

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Given their reaction, it would be nice if they were more upfront and honest about it on their website. A lot of people -- including myself -- were bitten by the unexpected. Less issues with durability than performance, of which we had very high hopes considering how much durability is given up.

Specifically, it would have been nice if they outlined the known issues surrounding compaction and how much of an impact not running compaction will have after weeks or months.

Essentially, almost every reasonable use case absolutely requires either taking a regular outage for compaction or using a 3-node replica set to do a rotate-compaction dance. This is an EXTREMELY frustrating thing to run into and surprises like this that pop up after deployment are unlikely to earn them any allies.

10gen has been publicly talking about working on online, incremental compaction for over a year now. Riak, CouchDB, Cassandra, Redis (AOF), and HBase all have incremental, online compaction.

Agreed. I expected a lot of defensiveness/spin when I spoke with them. But really, not a lot of that at all. They hedged just the tiniest bit about data loss, but were very forthright. As a reporter, I really can't say how refreshing that is or how infrequently you see it.

Which is surprising considering how positive 10gen looks coming out of this thing. A clear sign of maturity on their part.

As a recent adopter of MongoDB, it was interesting to read about the issues that were raised. While I was already reasonably familiar with how it worked from my experiences with it, following this whole kerfuffle has actually been an interesting insight into the history of MongoDB and helps equip me as a potential advocate/evangelist to be able to respond to common criticisms.

10gen definitely handled it perfectly.

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