Two days ago, someone called ‘nomoremongo’ posted this on Y Combinator News.
Several people (me included) stumbled upon the article, read it, and took it at face value. It’s on the Internet, it’s got to be true, right?
No, seriously. I read it, and parts of it resonated with my understanding of how MongoDB works. I saw some of the “warnings” and they seemed real. I read this one (#7) and ironically, this was the one that convinced me that this was a true post.
**7. Things were shipped that should have never been shipped** Things with known, embarrassing bugs that could cause data problems were in "stable" releases--and often we weren't told about these issues until after they bit us, and then only b/c we had a super duper crazy platinum support contract with 10gen. The response was to send up a hot patch and that they were calling an RC internally, and then run that on our data.
Who but a naive engineer would feel this kind of self-righteous outrage 😉 I’ve shared this outrage at some time in my career, but then I also saw companies ship backup software (and have a party) when they knew that restore couldn’t possibly work (yes, a hot patch), software that could corrupt data in pretty main stream circumstances (yes, a hot patch before anyone installed stuff) etc.,
I spoke with a couple of people who know about MongoDB much better than I do and they all nodded about some of the things they read. The same article was also forwarded to me by someone who is clearly knowledgeable about MongoDB.
OK, truth has been established.
Then I saw this tweet.
Which was odd. Danny doesn’t usually swear (well, I’ve done things to him that have made him swear and a lot more but that was a long time ago). Right Danny?
Well, he had me at the “Start thinking for yourself”. But then he went off the meds, “MongoDB is the next MySQL”, really …
I think there’s a kernel of truth in the MongoDB rant. And it is certainly the case that a lot of startups are making dumb architectural decisions because someone told them that “MongoDB was web-scale”, or that “CAP Theorem told them that databases were dead”.
Was this a hoax? I don’t know. But it was certainly a reminder that all scams don’t originate in Nigeria, and don’t begin by telling me that I could make a couple of billion dollars if I just put up and couple of thousand.
Hype Cycles 