Literally 1 month ago, I bought a car and did exactly this. What's impractical about spending a little time to read?
A database that has default configured that ends up corrupting users' data silently is like buying a car with the brakes disabled.
Well except that in the car case may brakes disabled won't make the car go faster, but in case of MongoDB I remember fans strutting write benchmarks around comparing it to Postgres, Couch and other database and telling how it is webscale. The reason that design decision was made is shady. That was my initial point.
So, let me get this straight: You laid down tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle that you only post-purchase read the manual of, and you're raising this as some sort of standard people should follow?
Honestly, asking the right questions (and test-driving) upfront should be what lands the purchase, and not discovering the folly of purchasing a car with such ass-backwards issues you only discover after the fact when you bother to dig out the manual.
You drove it off the lot after you bought it, right? Or did you read the manual in the lot right after signing the papers locking you into the purchase?
Honestly, how can people on HN actually be this against reading? Especially things that are really important? Sure, don't read the contest rules for your McDonald's monopoly. But if the data for your livelihood depends on something, there's no excuse for not reading the documentation.
It's impractical because people live a finite amount of time and this is a terrible use of it
You don't need to read every word of everything, but some things are worth it. Do you sign contracts without reading them too since it's a "terrible use of" your time?
Yes - I am saying in this particular car example, the benefit derived reading the entire manual before purchasing/driving a car is not worth the cost unless your time is worth very little. As others have pointed out, no one is flipping through the manual to check whether the brake pedal actually applies the brakes
But it is a good engineering decision to thoroughly read the docs before jumping into a new datastore like Mongo, I agree. Learning there are things like gigantic global locks and unsafe writes are normally enough to make you say, "hey, I probably shouldn't use this to store production data I actually care about"
I did experience one once though: I discovered that a vehicle had traction control when the system activated during a skid. The computer and I disagreed about the best way to respond, and the surprise did make the situation more dangerous than it could have been.
In both vehicles and databases, the situations in which the product might do something unexpected and dangerous should be clearly documented in their own section of the manual. Databases should say "here are the things that could lead to data corruption or loss". Vehicles should say "here are the situations where the vehicle might disregard or override the driver's control inputs".
I suspect some people will believe the results wouldn't have been what I expected without the traction control. I can't prove they would have been, but I did grow up and learn to drive in Alaska. Based on my experience, I think I would have done better than the computer did.
Here's somebody describing the basic idea involved while discussing the joys of mildly irresponsible driving on cloverleafs: http://www.scottgood.com/jsg/blog.nsf/d6plinks/SGOD-66RJ2Y