Why MongoDB and NoSQL make me want to scream

Recently I saw an article on the MongoHQ blog where they described a “slow query” and how to improve the performance.

The problem is this. I have a document with the following fields:

And the status can be something like ‘published’, ‘rejected’, ‘in progress’, ‘draft’ etc.,

I want to find all articles with some set of statuses and sorted by submit date.

Apparently the MongoDB solution to this problem (according to their own blog) is to:

create a new field called ‘unpublished_submit_date’
set that field to a ‘null’ value if the document is of an uninteresting status (i.e. published)
set that field to the submitdate if it is an interesting status (i.e not published)
then query on the single column unpublished_submit_date

Really? Really? You’ve got to be kidding me.

For more on this interesting exchange, a response from a MongoDB fanboy, and a follow-up, read my work blog at

The things people have to do to use NoSQL, boggles the mind!