

10gen's response to MongoDB's slams - xtacy
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/11/hacker-news-and-the-damage-don.php

======
politician
I had hoped that this article would be a focused point by point response to
the anonymous pastebin rant.

Unfortunately, it was less about 10gen or MongoDB, and more about the efficacy
of Hacker News as a forum for disseminating information. Plug in any
controversial technology and the article sounds about the same: Al Gore on
Global Warming vs a report claiming to debunk it, Microsoft on Silverlight vs
a report claiming that it's no longer supported, James Randi on his $1,000,000
challenge vs someone claiming that their version of ESP really is real.

" _... the reaction on HN is heartening. Though it's disappointing it made it
to the front page at all, it also seems that the bulk of the audience at HN
took it with the grain of salt it deserved._ "

I'm unimpressed with this assessment. HN participants were quick to identify
the key issues of provenance while simultaneously picking apart the claims.
Regardless of whether this was a hoax -- I personally think it was an
exaggerated rant of someone who was seriously frustrated -- isn't this how
peer review is supposed to work? Someone makes a claim. The claim and the
claimant are assessed. Conclusions are drawn. There's nothing disappointing
about it.

In my opinion, HN worked efficiently and quickly to debunk or validate the
claims. The article needed to reach the front page in order to achieve a
critical mass of participation in order to discover a consensus which seems to
be that many of the claims were overblown or based on out-of-date information,
but some were real. This conclusion was validated by 10gen's president Max
Schireson,

" _... rather than deflecting the entire thing, Schireson and Horowitz were
fairly candid about MongoDB's shortcomings. Of the nine sections, Schireson
says that "some are definitely valid, some we haven't heard or seen."_ "

Rather than feeling disappointed, the newsworthy aspect of this episode is
_how well_ the HN community and moderation system worked in this case, and how
reasonable 10gen was in their response. Many companies (e.g. British Petroleum
on the Deep Horizon disaster) will continue to spin the news even when there
is video evidence.

It would have been nice if ReadWriteWeb focused on that rather than attempting
to paint a negative picture of community sourced news.

~~~
jzb
"There's nothing disappointing about it."

There's a lot disappointing about it. HN, like it or not, has gotten to a
point where many people use it for tech news and don't read comments. When a
story makes it to the top of HN, it gets tweeted to an audience of about 40K
people - who generally don't see the comments at all. (links go straight to
stories, not to the HN site.)

So there's a huge potential for misinformation when a piece like this makes it
to the front page at all.

The peer review worked, but in my opinion a better system wouldn't even put
this in front of a large enough audience to matter. It was _an anonymous
pastebin_ \- it's not like this was debunking something on CNet or RWW that
would have been widely seen anyway.

~~~
bigiain
I don't see that as "disappointing" for HN regulars.

We vote on things that are interesting to discuss, not to indicate there's any
validity to the article. If non-discussion-participants are relying on the
voting mechanism to provide "accurate tech news", they've only got themselves
to blame for the "huge potential for misinformation".

~~~
Joakal
It is disappointing to me as well.

People should be upvoting articles based on quality, not headline-bait or
baseless rants (no data of bugs, no logs, etc) or rants where the person is
oblivious (locks are in the docs).

Unfortunately, I can't downvote links. Like other sites, I can only ignore it
for so long before it's drowned in noise (lack of interesting _quality_
links).

~~~
politician
Many submissions don't make it to the front page given what I've seen on
"new", but here we had a rant that - like it or not - made a number of serious
allegations against MongoDB; some number of which, after examination by HN
regulars, were _confirmed_ by 10gen in a follow-up piece by RWW.

I don't really understand your position or complaint - are you suggesting that
the anonymous nature of the source is sufficient to disqualify it outright?
Who determines 'baselessness', isn't that a consensus process? Are you
commenting on a general feeling that HN promotes a lower number of quality
links then "in the earlier days"?

------
MichaelGagnon
The main point of the Pastebin rant is the claim that Mongo's development
standards are insufficient for mission-critical software (such as databases).

So I looked through Mongo's change logs and one of the first things I saw for
version 2.0.0 is a "huge" issue: "reIndex() on secondary drops all indexes"
<https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3866>

This sounds like a bad bug for a database to have. And in this article 10gen
president says that data loss hasn't been a problem since 1.8, which seems to
contradict their own change log....

~~~
mnutt
I think most people think of data loss as data that is gone forever.

That doesn't excuse a large bug like this from existing, but it doesn't
contradict his assertion.

------
staunch
MongoDB is a very ambitious, very new, and very large piece of software.
Betting your company on something that meets that description entails
significant risk.

If MongoDB makes it possible for you to do something unique, that no other
proven solution would allow, it might be worth the risk.

If you used MongoDB because you heard it's the latest hip technology, and your
company suffers, you made a stupid mistake that you'll hopefully learn from.

~~~
fedd
right. read the doc beforehand, and for financial data use the time proven
relational dbs. they're "slow" for a reason.

for massive user generated content where big numbers of statistics come into
play, and noone would die if you lose their hard-composed 140 char tweet, use
transaction- and lock-free, easily-sharded, rarely flushed to disk stores.

------
vailripper
I was quite impressed with how MongoDB handled everything. They were quick to
respond in an intelligent (read: not hot air) manner, admitted that their
product still has some shortcomings that they're working on. I wish more
companies were as honest.

~~~
jzb
Agreed. I expected a lot of defensiveness/spin when I spoke with them. But
really, not a lot of that at all. They hedged just the tiniest bit about data
loss, but were very forthright. As a reporter, I really can't say how
refreshing that is or how infrequently you see it.

~~~
eCa
Which is surprising considering how positive 10gen looks coming out of this
thing. A clear sign of maturity on their part.

------
andreyf
_A single-sourced, anonymous, piece like this one wouldn't (or at least
shouldn't) be making the front page of widely read publications._

Is this something HN can fix?

When I vote something up (as I did with the article mentioned), I'm thinking
"this seems interesting", not "this seems authoritative and well sourced". The
idea that someone might go through the effort of writing something like this
as a "prank" didn't even enter my mind. Perhaps it might help for there to be
some short-circuit mechanism for publicly flagging false stories which are
found to be blatantly fabricated (or is it a rare enough occurrence that it
doesn't matter)?

~~~
pseudonym
_A single-sourced, anonymous, piece like this one wouldn't (or at least
shouldn't) be making the front page of widely read publications._

Shouldn't it be? I think HN was perfectly fine in this regard. There are a lot
of companies that aren't 10gen that would take this, go to a court, and try
and dig up the person who wrote the article to sue them for libel, whether the
article is true or not.

Just because in this case it was a hyperbolistic rant, doesn't mean there
won't be a situation in the future where there's valid points being raised
against a company that might retaliate against the author.

And as has been noted, the first comments on the article were counterpoints to
it.

~~~
jzb
"There are a lot of companies that aren't 10gen that would take this, go to a
court, and try and dig up the person who wrote the article to sue them for
libel, whether the article is true or not."

Please show me the cases of a company taking someone to court for libel for
making technical complaints such as this.

It happens _all the time_ on blogs and in mailing lists where people sound off
like this about products (rightly or wrongly) and I have not heard of a
single, solitary case of a person being taken to court for libel by a tech
company.

By the way - the odds are that any company that tried that would lose, not
only in court but also in public opinion.

Other companies may not handle it as well as 10gen - but I've yet to see a
company try to take someone to court.

------
mark_l_watson
My impression is that people who use MongoDB for what it is good for tend to
love it, mostly because it is "developer friendly." I use MongoDB a lot, and
at least that is my take.

Soon after I saw the rant, I blogged about how I work around some MongoDB
issues. Also, anyone who uses MongoDB without carefully reading the
documentation (apparently like the _ranter_ ) is going to have problems.

------
shin_lao
For any software you will find an unhappy customer to tell you how horrid the
install was... Sometimes it's because the software is bad, software just
inadequate, also the problem can be in the customer's environment...

What matters is what kind of mission the software successfully accomplished
and how.

------
Werba
I thins the rumour whose start because oraccle make own Nosql database. For me
Mongodb is great

