Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlokshin | Hacker News Reader

I feel like 1 - 2 years ago I was reading a slew of blog posts with the title "Why We Chose MongoDB." Now it seems like all of the blog posts are some sort of "We Just Finished Migrating off of MongoDB, Here's Why."

I know nothing about MongoDB and have never tried it. But the message seems pretty clear.

View on HN

The message is, just like every technology, there's an initial period where a vocal minority loves it and tries to use it for everything. Then, there's a backlash where a vocal minority hates it and thinks anyone who uses it is clearly an idiot. All the while, the silent majority go on getting work done. It's been this way for as long as I can remember.

I fully agree here. A couple of years ago, when I went on interviews at startups, they were all using nosql db's and were proud of it. More recently, I've been interviewing at startups that are now bigger, need to mine the data that they've collected over the last few years, and now are migrating off of nosql db's to rdbms' (or creating strange amalgams of the 2). I did see this coming, but it was very hard to make them understand back when it was the coolest thing.

The reality is that developers are maturing in their understanding of different technologies and they are learning how to apply them in correct use cases.

There continues to remain a "golden hammer" syndrome where white horses and unicorns run free, but it doesn't exist.

Instead, the vision of "NoSQL" was to tell developers that they did not have to use relational data for everything, but could, instead, use the right tool at the right time. Why is this such a hard concept?

If you are a developer and you don't understand the tool you are wielding (it's pretty clear the author of this blog didn't), then you will incorrectly use the tool and experience pain.

That is the fault of the developer, not the tool.

Care to specify at which point the author of the blog post misunderstand MongoDB? Its not pretty clear to me about that.

Are you saying that one of the way he is using MongoDB is incorrect? If yes, what point did he say reflects that?

His rants seems quite specific.

Love it. I think Node is the hot shit right now, and Rails is starting to get into the hate-period.

It's really just hipsters and music. We are all really just hipsters.

>I think Node is the hot shit right now, and Rails is starting to get into the hate-period.

I think you're about two years behind. Node is starting its hate-period. Rails got it a year or two ago.

What's the hot shit right now then, if not Node?

Meteor, websocket-dbs.

Meteor runs on top of Node.js

Node runs on Linux, but Linux isn't the hot shit.

HTML5 a panacea.

All developers need to understand the Gartner hype cycle.

Both that and the TAL, they complement each other:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle

It's just the standard Internet hype cycle.

I'm guessing within the next year we're going to see a similar backlash against Hadoop as people who rush to it begin to discover that map/reduce isn't necessarily the best distributed processing model for their needs. This despite Hadoop continuing to be the effective (non-silver) bullet it's always been.

Meh, Hadoop is much older than MongoDB, is an offline system, and doesn't destroy your data. There is also not much in the way of alternatives. I'm skeptical we will see many "we're switching off of Hadoop" posts anytime soon. That said, there is an growing undercurrent in the Clojure community to roll your own map reduce system instead of using Hadoop.

There's quite a bit in the way of alternatives. Sector/Sphere, Xgrid, and PVM come to mind. Sector/Sphere is perhaps the most direct alternative since it comes with its own distributed filesystem, but if you don't need a full-fledged DFS then the others are worth looking at too.

The main thing that really distinguishes Hadoop is that it's built to only do one kind of distributed processing. In exchange for asking you to don that straitjacket it offers ease of use. However, if your problem isn't naturally a map/reduce problem, or if your main performance bottleneck isn't disk I/O, then the alternatives become a lot more attractive.

I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on the hive mind of social media story up-voting.

There are a lot of people still switching to MongoDB for various reasons, but its no longer the cool kid on the block and thus not a lot of people are going to brag about switching to it.

I think a lot of people switched to it because it was cool, and maybe assumed that it could solve any application data storage problem and are now finding out that it may not have been a great choice for them.

I don't think its appropriate to take away from this that MongoDB and/or other document stores are bad. Instead, I think its important to understand how they work and decide how well it applies to your use case. It's not going to work well for all applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com