
Rackspace acquires ObjectRocket - grimey27
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-mongodb/
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ebbv
Title is misleading. This isn't an article about why one would Choose MongoDB,
it's purely a Rackspace press release.

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StavrosK
It's not just misleading, it is utterly false. There's no "Why" in the article
at all.

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nicktelford
> 3\. MongoDB is the de facto choice for NoSQL applications

The point of "NoSQL" systems are to use the most appropriate solution for the
problem instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, which was the tradition when
relational systems were the only choice.

The notion of a "de facto choice" at all seems to be the biggest mistake
nearly everyone makes when evaluating such systems these days. People are so
focused on evaluating the available systems that they forget the most
important step: to analyse their own problem domain.

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dschiptsov
The best marketed database-level locks ever.)

There was a nice article from NYT about an addictive junk food. It should
include MongoDB as a use case - lots of hype and crap inside.)

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nirvana
Engineers need to be disciplined. You know there's a problem with the culture
when things like MongoDB become popular, despite very highly public failures,
and fundamentally bad engineering choices.

It shows the power of marketing and ideology (people like mongoDB because it's
fast on a single node and they can use SQL rather than having to learn
something new, so they become "believers" in it without regard for its lack of
scalability, or reliability, etc.)

~~~
cullenking
Wow, axe to grind or what? You have three comments on here all belittling
something that many people find perfectly acceptable and successful in
production. Of all the non-SQL choices, Mongo isn't a terrible one. We've got
(along with many other companies) 300gb in Mongo and it's been loads more
enjoyable to use in a replica set than MySQL has been in a master/slave
architecture, and every bit as reliable. More so if you count the simple live
failover that just works.

It's a data model that works very very well for some datasets. We use MySQL
for stuff that is obviously relational, but we store a bunch of geo data as
JSON for fast serving to javascript etc. It's a perfect fit.

But seriously, if you don't have a backup of any of your data stores, that's a
big problem.

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jbellis
"Instead of using AWS primitives, they built their service on their own
hardware in neighboring data centers, and utilized AWS DirectConnect to
provide low latency connectivity."

To me that sounds like, "we deploy on SSDs." Which then makes me wonder if the
new AWS SSD instances make this obsolete.

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pquerna
The High-I/O Quadruple Extra Large starts at around ~$2232 per month for 2tb
of SSD storage.

With this kind of pricing you will have a hard time meeting user expectations
about price; Even with high multi-tenancy on top, and if you tune up that
density too much, you will probably push too much ram, as the instances only
have 60.5GB accessible, which with 2tb of disk is pretty unbalanced for many
mongodb use cases.

Disclosure: I'm a Racker and worked on this project.

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jedberg
I just wanted to say congrats to the Objectrocket team! Their founder and CEO
used to be my boss at eBay/PayPal. :)

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bretpiatt
The performance and tech detail post linked in the general article may be
interesting to folks here: [http://devops.rackspace.com/benchmarking-hosted-
mongodb-serv...](http://devops.rackspace.com/benchmarking-hosted-mongodb-
services.html)

Disclosure: I'm a Racker on the team helping out with the project.

~~~
nirvana
I love all these "benchmarks" of "NoSQL" databases running on single nodes.
Plus you don't name the competitors or any configuration data so... this is
really marketing not engineering.

Not that any engineer worth a damn would use a database that loses data in the
first place.

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davidkassa
I'm pretty sure that Provider #1 is MongoHQ ("Replica Set: Small") and
Provider #2 is MongoLab ("Mini"). MongoHQ doesn't show a "Replica Set: Small"
anymore, though, on their pricing page - only Large.

Configuration data and multiple nodes would be nice.

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dkhenry
Glad to see more support behind MongoDB. I know its popular to hate it, but It
still has served me better then any of the alternatives I have tried.

I am hopefully that RethingDB can outdo them eventually, but for now BZ
Rackspace team

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sprobertson
I may be a meta-contrarian but MongoDB is thus far my favorite database, after
years with MySQL and Postgres. I spend all day building MVPs and there's
nothing better than adding to the schema [sic] halfway through without having
to run a migration.

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kushti
A data tool should be used for appropriate data. Mongo DB is the best for
flexible and loosely coupled data structures.

~~~
nirvana
...where you don't care if you lose the data. So data sets where you are
getting a new version of the data every day and so if you lose yesterday's
dataset you don't care.

also, datasets that fit on a single machine, rather than need to scale out
over many machines, unless you don't mind the intrinsically broken "scaling"
solution that is master-slave architectures.

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jshen
Can you explain what you mean by "lose data". I don't know much about mongo,
but I thought you could configure the client to wait for the disk write before
returning.

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ericcholis
Interesting that they chose ObjectRocket over MongoHQ or MongoLab.

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nlh
Take a peek at the article and associated benchmark post. I assume that
"Hosted AWS providers #1 and #2" refer to MongoHQ and MongoLab. You'll see why
they made their choice.

But as someone else pointed out, it's worth asking whether the new SSD
instances will help those other guys catch up or if there's more than disk
performance bottlenecks going on.

~~~
ericcholis
Agreed, I believe that the SSD instances made a big difference.

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wildchild
I hate being NoSQL hater. How to became a lover? Probably I got too much this
nosql noise around. Please somebody tell me how to write apps without
transactions at all? It solves one problem by adding different headaches.

