Comment by SFjulie1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SFjulie1 | Hacker News Reader

well by asking this question to mongo users you miss the audience of the people successfully scaling up -for less money- that may belongs to the people NOT using mongo.

Business is about costs and prices not about thinking that business is about the religious adoptions of mongo, agile, C#, python, linux ....

This question is saying that your business is ruled by the techs not anyone with the common sense needed to pay the bills (thus your paychecks).

The feedbacks I have to give you is that TCO per mb stored increase more than linearly with mongodb, with weiredly enough a decrease in SLA (due to the weired unexpected incident hard to troubleshoot) so if you look at the probability you have success, it is bad news. Customer expect cost to diminish with volume, thus prices (investors too). If the fat of your business model is around document storage, you have a problem.

You should not trust me, and do some real costs analysis of the cost per documents for your business case with more than one scenarii and make some costs analysis and some projections. Because even if someone else optimization worked for them, it may not be relevant to your business case: at one point you make money, so you issue a transaction that cannot be handled in a distributed system (CAP theorem + NoSQL==NoACID) and this point differs than fellow devs.

Mongo could be -not is- killing your business. If you do mongo because that is the only techno you know, consider that you have been taken hostage, and call SWAT to have your mongo guru arrested. They may look nice and harmless, but you are the hostages of dangerous fanatic religious techs. Maybe call an exorcist, it could be as efficient.

And then go back to thinking what is the most efficient way to have your bills paid, and how to diminish cost as your business grow. Forget technical stuff as a compass for making successful software solution. Success is about benefits only

Je dis ça, je dis rien, hein?! My .02 eurocents.

This is an unbelievable waste of a comment and the OP should not even consider this as feedback.

You completely ignore the question, make a comment about "religious adoptions of mongo" and then do an about-face by showing your OWN religious zeal AGAINST mongo.

Mongo is not killing his business. Your comment should be deleted.

To the OPs question: can you post any more specifics? 1M documents with an index shouldn't be an issue for the aggregation pipeline. What are the specs of the machine? What are your indexes? I think it would be tough to help without having that info, and sadly a question requiring that type of info may be best suited for something like Stack Overflow.

I don't know, it may not address the OP's specific question but it may, in a very circuitous way, address a need the OP doesn't recognize he has.

It is hardly arguable that there is a segment of the developer population that has a religious zeal for their "stack" or against others (just pick any random topic on functional programming or PHP for examples of each). It is entirely appropriate to discuss and address that in topics like this on HN, in my opinion.

this religious thing works the other way, too. e.g. i, after reading a couple dozen articles about mongo across the years, most of them linked from this site, have a religious zeal against mongo.

A database that had a server-wide lock (and highly trumpeted when they got the feature of only being database-wide) and had the amazingly in-depth IO strategy of mmap, defaulted to losing people's data, silently destroyed data on 32-bit, had a Java client that shipped with "catch { if rnd() > 0.1 then .... }", and spends a lot on money trying to be "webscale"?

Perhaps it's a deserved attitude.

That may well be the case. HN has a community of zealots for just about any programming or tech related thing (pro-Apple, anti-PHP, anti-C++, pro-functional, pro-javascript, you name it). That doesn't mean criticism (or support) automatically comes from a place of zealotry. In this particular case the parent comment in this thread didn't read at all like religious zealotry against mongoDB to me.

I suppose one might infer from it notion of a default assumption that developers are all zealots about their particular technology choices. I'm not sure such an assumption itself is terribly bad to have, honestly. Sometimes I think that if my only insight into the world of technology came from startup job postings and HN, I ought to be forgiven for thinking that the entire industry is a kind of elaborate and humorous play on role-playing game mechanics ("Ruby Dev" <==> "Developer/Ruby" class/skill combo), which are notorious for producing fanatical devotees of one combination or another.

I mean this as honest feedback, and please don't take it as a personal attack, but I think you are being unreasonably critical of the comment, and I suggest you take time to consider why that is.

The comment raised an interesting way of thinking about the problem that many developers would not consider, and while it might have had a fair bit of religious zeal, that is very common here and not worthy of comments like "unbelievable waste of a comment" and "your comment should be deleted".

Aye yai yai. Ya know, your response is part of the problem here. This may be a general shift in the way this site is going, and that may be fine, but what I expect from the comments in HN posts is far greater than what SFjulie1 posted. It's incoherent, off-topic, and filled with the anti-{%database%} mentality prevalent when something about MongoDB comes up.

    The comment raised an interesting way of thinking about the
    problem that many developers would not consider

Fantastic! Why can we not have an actual discussion about scaling MongoDB when the post is about scaling MongoDB! You want to have a conversation about different database engine solutions to the problem, go start a post about that. But this post was about MongoDB scaling. I may have been critical of the GP here, but you fail to appreciate the need and desire to keep HN to the level it should be.

The comment was not 'incoherent', to say so suggests that the actual points made no sense. Rather, the comment was simply written in poor English.

I think your comment only needed to be a polite "can we keep the conversation on the topic of MongoDB scaling" rather than a quite personal attack on the author.

Also, personally, I thought the main point raised about viewing the database choice from a business rather than development point of view was interesting and well worth discussion.

Why can we not have an actual discussion about scaling MongoDB when the post is about scaling MongoDB!

Because it might be more helpful to think about scaling your data needs than scaling with only a certain product.

Here's why: SFJulie1's comment came off as rambling and somewhat incoherent, if not a little childish and rude. In the past few hours one other account has popped up here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Ronaldo777 ) posting equally trollish comments in this same specific thread...

Just to give you an idea where SFJulie1 is coming from:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2pwkcl/help_nee...

I think mikegioia was perfectly reasonable in calling out this comment, it is trash and he was right to recognize it as such.

SFjulie1's comment is a good one, mikegioia.

Taking a look at the economics of a technology that's being used is a very sensible thing to do, especially for a business. If this analysis shows that one solution is inferior to another, it does not mean that the analyst has a "religious zeal" against the economically-inferior technology.

My entire point in this entire thread is to for once keep the conversation on topic about MongoDB without everyone going into a tangent on switching to Postgres or something else. I just want one post where we can actually talk about MongoDB scaling.

Somebody came here asking for help with a real world problem.

It would be doing this person a disservice to not mention alternative technologies that have solved very similar problems that have affected many other people/organizations.

It is total absurdity to avoid bringing up these solutions to the problem merely in order to maintain some vague purity of the discussion, or to otherwise keep the discussion unnecessarily and unhelpfully focused.

I feel like you're just ignoring what I'm saying. It is NOT helpful to suggest alternative technologies all the time, especially in this specific post.

If I asked on a forum for help with the engine on my Dodge Dart, and you posted "Just buy a Prius", that would not be helpful. Do you see how that isn't helpful? That's what I'm trying to say, that I would like to see, for once a post stay on topic when it's about MongoDB (heck, even PHP for that matter!).

If using a Prius instead of a Dart would very likely solve the problem(s) being experienced, then it is a perfectly reasonable thing to suggest. It would be wrong not to suggest it.

This submission is about a problem involving MongoDB. It is not about MongoDB itself. The submitter clearly wants a variety of ideas here. That's why the submission says, and I quote, "Any tips, stories, suggestions are welcome!"

"Any" means "any", including the suggestion that some other technology be used.

And I must add that I also point that given a good technical solution for a business case A, it may not map correctly to another business case.

It is always a question of context. So I do think the question is lacking of business context.

The question asked is a if there is a silver bullet. The problem is optimization are always context related. You can even improve a software's sclalabity by changing your processes (who needs concurrencial access to a database if your process can ensure one and only one person is enough to do a certain provisioning that is Single Point of Performance loss?).

I mean, my life as a dev would be easier if managers where not asking for cost reductions and forcing technical solutions that increase costs and then convocating us because the company is having unexpected loss, and thus our wages have to be cut (or more often we have to do up to 50% extra hours coding for free) (and their wages are not). So yes, I am bitter, and unnice.

And even if you would be posting the "right question" here; then we would conclude that you are asking for a free audit, and also probably leaking business secrets (yep, btw, if you are on a competitive market, the concurrence and your customers now know you have a problem with scaling, and how you take costly decisions without caring about your costs... nice).

So with a brilliant reasoning ab absurdum, I can thus demonstrate that neither questions (the mongo oriented or the business oriented) are good questions to ask on HN.

It should be an heuristic on HN, and there maybe should a howto ask the right question like this one http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Remember you are basically asking skilled people to do part of your job for free while aiming for a lot of money (I still wish you to be successful). It is quite logically itching poorly paid (or delusive (my case)) skilled coders.

And you are also leaking insider's information about your technology AND (lack of) business processes. And you may have future (and ex) cyberterrorists(joke)/concurrent/customers/partners/investors/employees here.

And you probably think security is about your 128 character gibberish SSO password OAUTH2 compliant chain you are using. Well most successful attacks are using social engineering, so now I know that I can hack you by proposing you a free software with a trojan aiming at solving your problem (using native active record so that it is not a first order backdoor). Or phone you as a contractor, and being paid to have a look at your documents because I know you are technologically a sitting duck.

I mean: seriously?

Advice #2: DON'T FEED THE TROLL (TL;DR) Yep, if you don't read until the end, you will not notice that I am serious, but choose deliberately a provocative tone because, I have fun, time, and I see this as the price to pay for my free consulting. I take the freedom to express my views in the formalism I choose. My intention is to see what will be the arbitration made by HN (and readers) between business (what I am saying is valid) and formalism (I say it in a clearly non consensual). So I intend to push my reasoning to the extreme just for measuring what is more important: business or being nice?

Do you see his reply below? Do you still think his comment was a good one? Sometimes I can't believe the people commenting here. This guy is a self-proclaimed troll that you are defending!

This is an interesting way of looking at the problem - as a 'TCO' of data stored. It's not one that I generally go to, but perhaps I should more.

I think the argument against it is that developer time and productivity is worth a considerable amount for many companies, and working with tools (DBMSs in this case, but it applies to lots more) that speed up application development is often worth more to the business than the basic cost of storing and serving data.

This isn't always the case, at Facebook scale for example, it might be that the most efficient use of money is to use (speaking entirely hypothetically here) is an Oracle database instead of MySQL, and instead hire twice as many developers because they are half as productive with it. Maybe that would be a good trade-off? However, at many (most?) companies, I suspect that the better trade-off would be to hire fewer developers and use tools that are more expensive to run.

And after that pay big support fees to Oracle.

There's the risk tolerance factor as well.

If product X is free, but requires hard to find skilled operators and doesn't have well established operational best practices, paying über dollars for Oracle might be the smart move.

Where I work, location and policies for hiring contract staff make a product like Mongo high risk for data we care about.

You're being trolled by SFJulie1.

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