Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

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> But unfortunately they seemed to spit in the face of DBAs and Ops people a long time ago by proclaiming them to be unnecessary and archaic.

WTF ? I have never heard 10gen say anything remotely like this. And it surely hasn't come across in their marketing. I mean seriously. Which developer thinks that in a production environment they are going to be the ones supporting the database ? Nobody.

> If MongoDB experts can't make their own services 100% reliable, what hope does a regular startup have of getting MongoDB to work well at scale.

The fact that you base your impression of MongoDB based on ZERO evidence just conjecture that the slowness of their site is database related says a lot about you too. There are many other reasons it could equally be: app server, network etc.

> If a DBA or Ops guy is being hired to manage a company's datastores, I don't see MongoDB (even 2.2) being a contender.

Have you even worked at an enterprise company before ? DBA/Ops aren't the ones in control. If the development team wants MongoDB installed and have business justification it gets installed.

> Developers may be unhappy since nothing yet is as easy to develop on, but they'll be happier in the end when stuff 'just works'.

But it does 'just work' that's the whole point. Developers aren't stupid and MongoDB is not the only database around. You just need to (god forbid) understand how the thing works.

> But unfortunately they seemed to spit in the face of DBAs and Ops people a long time ago by proclaiming them to be unnecessary and archaic.

>>WTF ? I have never heard 10gen say anything remotely like this.

From the "Ease of use" section of their Philosophy page http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Philosophy,

   This means that MongoDB works right out of the box, and you can dive right into developing your application, instead of spending a lot of time fine-tuning obscure database configurations.

There goes the indirect jab to the RDBMS DBAs wasting their time.

How on earth do you equate that statement with "we don't need a DBA when we get into production" ?

Do you need a DBA to get MySQL running ? No. Oracle ? No. SQL Server ? No. That's all it means. Normal people understand that there is a difference between getting something running and deploying it into production.

Point me a doc(or a tiny little red note link, like in the 32 bit installer download page) where 10gen says that you will need a dedicated MongoDB DBA to maintain production server. You see 10gen marketing machine have successfully created a perception that MongoDB is so much magical that you don't have to worry about data. New programmers with less knowledge in RDBMS are buying this argument. And most of the time they start into development just after reading basic tutorial. This the problem GP is trying to address.

> The fact that you base your impression of MongoDB based on ZERO evidence just conjecture that the slowness of their site is database related says a lot about you too. There are many other reasons it could equally be: app server, network etc.

Those other things are trivial to fix (e.g. add more app servers) so I too think that it's safe to assume it's probably the data store's fault.

> But it does 'just work' that's the whole point.

Did you read the article?

None of what you said makes ANY sense. Have you ever actually scaled an app before ?

Adding more app servers increases the number of requests you can handle. It doesn't make slow apps or latency faster. Both of those are possible causes for why certain requests may be slower. It's not necessarily a database problem.

> Did you read the article?

Yes. I read the documentation before installing MongoDB so I haven't had any problems (so far).

There's no reason other than the data store that would make their site that slow. Yes I have experience in this area. Until they come out and tell me otherwise I'm gonna bet that the data store is at fault. I could be wrong but I'm willing to give you 5 to 1 odds against.

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