

Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks - jnunemaker
http://railstips.org/2009/12/18/why-i-think-mongo-is-to-databases-what-rails-was-to-frameworks

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moe
Spot on, I say. Mongo is usually filed in the K/V bin, while in reality it
actually falls into a much more exciting middle ground between RDMBS, document
store and K/V store.

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jnunemaker
Glad you found it interesting!

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petewarden
Mongo's killer feature for me is the support. The team has been absolutely
awesome about helping me track down bugs and sort out my issues.

By contrast I've spent a lot of time on Tokyo, but I'm actively trying to move
away from it these days because there have just been too many mysterious
problems. I've tracked down some of them and submitted patches, but it's cost
me a lot of time I'd rather be spending working on my product. Don't get me
wrong, Tokyo is chock-full of great code, but anything as general-purpose as a
database is going to have all sorts of interface and configuration issues that
require more time than your typical open-source project founder can put in.

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jnunemaker
They are so responsive on the mailing list. You can mention features/bugs and
see them in the next nightly.

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gr366
Agreed, the comparison of Mongo to databases as Rails is to frameworks is
appropriate. I recently started playing with Mongo in a Rails app and the
Array type led to an a-ha moment followed by giddy handclapping and a fair
amount of code deletion.

Working at a large company that's pretty invested in RDBMS, I'm curious to see
where the downside of using something like MongoDB comes in. E.g. James
Golick's creation of Friendly because they hit a scaling wall — how big do you
have to get for it to become an issue?

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jnunemaker
Totally agree about the array key. It's amazing how your code gets more simple
with a simple tweak like that.

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mark_l_watson
MongoDB really is simple to use. Unlike CouchDB, you can make adhoc queries
without defining map/reduce functions. In MongoDB, array elements are indexed
so searching for words, tags, etc. is easy. The Ruby client support is
excellent. Casandra is really easy to set up (installing the cassandra gem,
then doing 'cassandra_helper cassandra' installs all cassandra dependencies).
But Casandra requires a lot of application specific configuration. I always
leave MongoDB running on my MacBook and two of my servers so it is ready at
hand.

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andreyf
From my personal experiences with the people who are working full-time on
Mongo and Rails, there is little comparison in their skill level - the guys
developing Mongo are without doubt better hackers.

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chrischen
They're really responsive to feedback. Documentation is great and usually you
get questions in the mailing list answered same-day (within a few hours) by
one of the staff.

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zefhous
I've been using MongoMapper with Rails for a while and I've really enjoyed it.
It's so freeing to be able to include embedded documents or other modules and
not have to deal with migrations.

ActiveRecord is great, but MongoDB and MongoMapper feel so much more natural
to me.

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tengkahwee
This looks good. Care to reveal some plans of this product? Is it going to be
commercial or open source? Thanks for sharing.

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jnunemaker
Commercial. Monthly subscription per account (which can have multiple sites).
Most likely based on tiered pageviews. Pageviews are what cost us so that is
how we'll charge. :)

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leej
i think the main issue about mongodb is its license, AGPL 3, and they should
think about it. from feature pov, it has lots of small niceties but real big
thing about mongodb is auto-sharding and this feature is still alpha.

