So an Anonymous Coward’s pastebin rant against MongoDB has an awful lot of legs. I circulated a few thoughts yesterday morning to head-off the inevitable concerns of “um, we’re doing a lot with Mongo, and now I’m nervous”:
[It] really smacks of oops-I-didn’t-plan-and-got-bit, which is entirely too easy to do on the razor’s edge. 10s millions users without a decent pre-launch beta, load-testing etc? Most of the arguments here are things well-known in the mongo community: GWL, sharding problems under load, eventual consistency, etc.
So to everyone out there who, after reading that pastebin:
- might have thrown up a little
- questioning why/if they’re using MongoDB
- thinking perhaps last week you made the worse career decision of your life
- might want to re-evaluate the technology decisions of co-workers who advocated it
GOOD! These feelings are totally valid and in-general will do everything to help MongoDB and its community. Really, I mean that. Even if everything in that pastebin is a lie (most things are half-truths, at best) and the negative reactions because of it are “baseless”, they serve to raise questions, they serve to validate, they serve to do what we should do with every technology decision we make: be skeptical and prove.
A lot of the MongoDB adoption I’ve seen amounts to “well I think it’s cool because I can use JavaScript” from the UI crowd or “I suck at writing SQL queries” from the app crowd or “I hate tuning my systems” from the systems crowd… or, worse “I’ve heard it’s awesome”.
I know in the Age of iEverything, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to just buy/do things because some salesman in a turtle-neck tells you he just changed everything, but if you ever take anything home from my writing:
Don’t Ever Make An Infrastructure Technology Decision Because You Heard It Was Awesome
But, in case you were curious, MongoDB is awesome, and you should use it: just don’t take my word for it. Be skeptical and prove.