Hacker News Reader

If this was a proprietary database we'd call that vendor lock-in and advocate an open source solution. 10gen is a company that earns it's revenue from selling support. They are highly incentivized to lure you in and trap you in a situation that requires a lot of consulting.

View on HN

In practice, for any sufficiently complex application, all databases carry a fair bit of lockin.

Or they could just be interested in adding useful features.

PostgreSQL has HSTORE which is a useful but proprietary feature. Cassandra has the ability to have Lists/Maps as data types. Again useful but proprietary.

If you are that concerned about database independence then do what everyone else does. Use an ORM, minimise coupling in your domain model and do as much as possible in the application layer.

You are misusing the word "proprietary." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

Cassandra support for lists/maps is open-source. Cassandra is Apache Software Foundation project. Where is it proprietary? Or do you mean something else under "proprietary"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com