Antirez, I have a great deal of respect for your work, but calling somebody else's work "garbage" is not cool.
Constructive criticism in order to make the benchmark more relevant would've been more helpful.
Constructive criticism in order to make the benchmark more relevant would've been more helpful.
I used to think that DB comparisons were bad because of vested interests, like Oracle refusing to allow anyone to benchmark them. But I now think that Antirez's view is much closer to the truth: poorly informed people can't set up benchmarks correctly because they don't understand the underlying DB model and possible optimizations, and well informed people can't set up benchmarks because they can't think of a fair benchmark that doesn't explicitly handicap one model or set of optimizations versus the other.
(Of course, in this case, the comparison is pretty bad. Other commenters have noted that an inverted index is more sensible here and that Postgres' text search support should have been used. But the big issue to me is that the graphs are incredibly misleading, with totally different units on the y axis, so that a 0.004 second win for Mongo looks like as big a win as a 3 second win for PG.)
garbage here means: not very useful. More politically correct people are going to use a different word, but the concept is the same. DBs comparison / benchmarking is hard and I read many blog posts about people that apparently don't even have a solid understanding / experience with one of the systems (sometimes with both the compared ones), so this articles are really not going to help but to confuse other users.
You being Denis Ritchie's reincarnation or John Doe changes nothing to that, and to the fact that you have been disrespectful of someone else's work.
Personal opinion: on HN you have the right to be disrespectful of a work that is of mediocre quality (which is the case) if you provide the community with more details on why it is bad and how to improve, and, more importantly, if you do not deny being disrespectful just two posts below by changing on the fly the meaning of a word.
1) This kind of puritanism you express is not part of the hacking culture at all.
2) To compare two database systems that are the hard work of a lot of people, without a solid understanding, is the real problem here, because it means to spread shit to one or the other, and also to have an effect into potential users trying to understand what to use.
So I think that the only that should be worrying about their behavior is people posting incorrect stuff.
But because I trust in freedom I don't want to prevent them from posting with some kind of pre-post filter. Nor you should try to prevent me to say this kind of blog posts are often garbage.