MongoDB, Better

http://go.rackspace.com/better.html

by technel • 12 years ago

67 60 12 years ago

go.rackspace.com

dkhenry3• 12 years ago

I would love to see a use case from a large deployment. MongoDB is trivial at small scale and it is only when you get to large deployments that it really needs some TLC. If they can somehow make large deployments simple it might make mongo a viable contender again for Humongous data ( If you have a data schema that would play nicely with it )

AdrianRossouw9• 12 years ago

i would love to see a solid technical reason to choose mongodb over any of the other NoSQL db's (couchdb, riak, redis, etc..) other than "it's popular".

No, I'm not trolling. I really want to know : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446919

mikegioia2• 12 years ago

It allows you to query json documents in a way similar to sql. redis is key/val and sits in ram, couch requires complicated design documents to query and is better as a key/val, but I'm unfamiliar with riak.

I think trello uses mongo primarily for production. technically it's feasible but I've found it to be more trouble than it's worth to scale -- too many machines are required per shard. I'm currently looking into rethink db as a replacement now though.

timfpark2• 12 years ago

i think a lot of the reasons I've seen come down to business reasons, not technical. Someone wants an app fast, like now, and MongoDB is fast to setup and get running with.

nevi-me• 12 years ago

Geolocation, specifically GeoJSON. That's the main reason why I chose it (I started working on my app while it was at 2.0). When 2.4 came out with better geospatial indices (albeit basic compared to PostgreSQL+PostGIS) and GeoJSON support, I moved to using GeoJSON, and I am happy so far.

The website/app is at https://rwt.to , and an example route search is; from "Milky Way, Johannesburg" to "O.R. Tambo International Airport".

I should note that I've had a look at geocouch and it didn't fit my use case, I'm not doing trivial 'find my 3 places near [y,x]' queries, but am traversing a pseudo-network of routes to calculate directions. Neo4j also wouldn't have worked in my case. TokuMX is based on MongoDB 2.2 as far as I'm aware, so them too.

nemothekid3• 12 years ago

I would consider "Its easy to get started with" a valid technical reason.

Of all the "We moved from MongoDB to Cassandra/Riak/etc and gained massively!" I've rarely seen - and its possible that this is selection bias - companies start with the other NoSQL options.

I want to say, that unlike MongoDB - the others actually force you to think about your data and actively decide how you are going to store it. With MongoDB you can pretty much add an index on anything, but with Cassandra (maybe Riak/Dynamo too) you only get one free index before you have to denormalize and write application code to keep your performance.

Then lastly, MongoDB is good enough for most use cases. We didn't see major performance issues until we started constantly writing data to it (high write/low read) (basically we were wrestling with lock contention). I'd wager for a significant amount of MongoDB deployments, not only is Mongo easy to use, but fast enough too.

So while the other NoSQLs are (probably) more complicated and likely more performant, MongoDB, to me, hits a sweet spot of ease of use and performance that is good enough for most applications out there.

However, considering other "raw" technical aspects like performance, durability and scaling I've never seen anything that has shown MongoDB to be a leader.

victorhooi2• 12 years ago

I'm sorry, but this seems a bit of a lazy question.

There are many large-scale deployments of MongoDB - a simple Google search will yield you results.

Off the top of my head - FourSquare, Stripe, ServerDensity, eBay (non-site) etc.

MongoDB (the company) also uses it for MMS - their cloud-based monitoring system, which probably handles hundreds of thousands of metrics every second from tens of thousands of hosts.

So yes, there is a lot of FUD about "it doesn't scale" etc.

Most of the FUD seems to originate from people not reading the manual, and completely misconfiguring things, and wondering why it doesn't work.

To be fair, most competing products (Riak, Couch etc.) will scale enough for most people. So this is sort of a red herring. (And by the point that you are as big as FourSquare, the assumption is you'll probably hire engineers who will read the manual =) ).

So the decision boils down to other things - how easy is the query language, do you need GeoJSON support, do you need aggregations, how mature is the overall ecosystem etc.

And that's why people are picking MongoDB - not really the WOAH, LOOK AT THE OPS PER SECOND!.

camus22• 12 years ago

Most of the FUD seems to originate from people not reading the manual, and completely misconfiguring things, and wondering why it doesn't work.

Most of the FUD comes from the deceptive marketing 10gen used to promote MongoDB. It now has a well deserved bad reputation that will never go away,no matter how much startup choosed it.

dkhenry3• 12 years ago

Maybe you misunderstood what I was asking. I know MongoDB can scale out to very large sizes, but it becomes more of a effort to scale it out correctly ( 3 config servers and all shards replicated ). My question is can I just turn a dial at rack space and now I have my seven servers all provisioned and configured correctly, since that take the dead simple single node MongoDB deployment and extends it to the sharded replicated cluster.

nasalgoat• 12 years ago

I managed one of the largest MongoDB installations and I can safely say running it at scale is extremely difficult.

They've made a few changes, like not hardcoding the maximum number of connections and shards anymore, which helps but overall the big problems like database-level locking are serious problems even a year later.

The reasons for choosing it were very simple - the lead developer was familiar with JSON and liked using it for queries, and he liked the "schema-less" nature of document storage. No consideration was given to performance or scaling issues, it was purely a comfort level decision.

dkhenry3• 12 years ago

Right and rackspace is claiming they are taking care of all that for me. Or are they just spinning up hosts and I still need to configure everything

harlowja3• 12 years ago

I wonder how licensing works here with mongodb being AGPL.

A message I proxied recently: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-Marc...

epoxyhockey• 12 years ago

Yahoo isn't the only large company to instruct its employees to avoid mongodb due to it being AGPL. In my opinion, the only people using mongodb in a commercial setting are those who are paying 10gen for a commercial license or those that don't know they are violating the AGPL license.

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

the only people using mongodb in a commercial setting are those who are paying 10gen for a commercial license or those that don't know they are violating the AGPL license.

It is not clear to me exactly what the problem is from the message. Are we now discouraged to use MongoDB as a database (from startup to university), or writing MongoDB database driver based on existing MongoDB language driver such as pymongo or writing on top of MongoDB's database driver?

alrs• 12 years ago

???

Most people in a commercial setting aren't modifying the MongoDB source code. AGPL does not require that any software that communicates with AGPL software be AGPL'd.

But yes, if you're using MongoDB in a commercial endeavor, and you modify the source code, and you're using AGPL version, you do need to share your changes to the MongoDB source code.

AdrianRossouw9• 12 years ago

This is actually really interesting. Due to it's nature, using mongo as a data source can easily become something very deeply ingrained into your application.

Whereas if mysql shipped with a similar restriction, you could easily flip the connection strings and have it mostly working on postgres or something else.

yanowitz• 12 years ago

If you're stuck with mongo in legacy infrastructure and it doesn't make sense to refactor/architect it away, I suggest tokumx. It's allowed us to kick the can on this problem for at least another year. Almost no lock contention, far more compact on disk (even cheap disk space adds up) and (what seems to be) a growing set of users.

I'm optimistic that pg9.4 will be our migration path. But regardless, tokumx has given us the breathing room to defer the decision.

mikegioia2• 12 years ago

I was considering tokumx because it seems like scaled better than normal mongodb but to be honest I'd love to move of this database entirely. I'm somewhat unfamiliar with postgres but does it have a storage/querying system comparable to mongo?

munro• 12 years ago

If you want to store & query JSON [1], Postgres 9.3 is great! Plus you can index functions, meaning you get cool things like fast JSON look up, and doing case insensitive searches. Which is hard in Mongo, you would either have to do a slow regexp look up, or save a lower case version in your application logic.

  CREATE INDEX ON members ((lower(my_json_data->>'email')));

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/functions-json.htm...

DAddYE• 12 years ago

Have you considered rethinkdb?

emperorcezar• 12 years ago

None of this means anything unless there is clear pricing. Am I not seeing it?

saryant• 12 years ago

http://objectrocket.com/pricing

mason553• 12 years ago

Seems a bit expensive assuming each shard gets you three more servers. Based on RS pricing you could build your own instances with 1TB SSDs for like $500 each, so for the same price that you'd get 100GB x 3 shards you could do 1TB x 3 shards on your own. I guess with the RS pricing you also get managed backups but IMO that's not worth the price difference. If you figure you build your own, 3 shards x 3 RS members x 1TB is 9 servers at $500 each or $4500. With this service... if 100GB is $1599 you have to imagine 1TB has to be at least on the order of $10k, so you're looking at $30k total. $25k a month for managed backups and infrastructure just doesn't seem worth it to me. Maybe what they're using is more powerful than the instances we're on but I still have trouble reconciling the pricing. And if that 1TB is 1TB total and not 1TB per shard/replica set member then the pricing looks way, way worse.

gtrubetskoy• 12 years ago

This sums up MongoDB pretty well: http://nyeggen.com/blog/2013/10/18/the-genius-and-folly-of-m...

bronson• 12 years ago

That's the best summary of MongoDB I've ever seen. Thanks!

(It's not full of vitriol and strawmen like most of the Mongo posts that seem to end up here.)

cordite• 12 years ago

Is this like MongoHQ?

jasonmccay2• 12 years ago

Sort of ... but there are pretty serious limitations.

1. You are locked into Rackspace as your provider. MongoHQ provides multiple cloud providers.

2. They force you to shard. This increases operational and application complexity ... and may not offer any real advantages for the amount of data that you have.

jrarredondo2• 12 years ago

I work for Rackspace.

On [1], you can actually keep your app in AWS and connect / migrate your data to OR over Direct Connect.

On [2], you don't have to shard. There is an option to scale vertically when you need to.

You can call RS people who can help guide you making the best decision on [1] or [2] based on your current and future situations.

putlake• 12 years ago

We use MongoDirector and have been pretty happy with it. They have a Bring Your Own AWS infra plan that works perfect.

jasonmccay2• 12 years ago

Isn't this just a link to an advertisement?

endijs• 12 years ago

Sometimes I wonder - what's hated more by HN readers... PHP or MongoDB... And what's not fun - i use both.

taude• 12 years ago

Funny, only seconds after clicking on the OP page, I started getting the targeted Ads for MongoDB & Rackspace when visiting YouTube videos.

MongoDB, Better

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