

CERN’s use of MongoDB for Large Hadron Collider data - meghan
http://blog.mongodb.org/post/660037122/holy-large-hadron-collider-batman

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ihodes
I'm curious to know why they chose to use MongoDB? Is it because its free &
fast? Or is it truly faster than a propriety SQL system?

Either way, it's nice to see that computation in science isn't stuck in the
90's, which is sometimes how it feels.

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ergo98
They use it as a trivial caching system of pre-aggregated data.

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brown9-2
Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't any number of other caching solutions
(such as memcached) be used in this situation?

In other words, are there any features specific to MongoDB that they are
actually making use of?

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ergo98
They don't give much details, but it sounds like a very superficial need that
could be accommodated by Redis, Memcached, AppFabric, and on and on. Kind of
surprised that they chose MongaDB as it's far from the fastest competitor.

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dschn
Just speculation, but the built-in map/reduce is probably quite useful.

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ergo98
Perhaps, but the description essentially said that there is a custom python
layer that aggregates the data, and they punt it into MongoDB with some SQL
extraction pattern simply to store it into that silo.

e.g. If I run a query for NAME LIKE 'BLAH%' it stores that resultset. If I run
NAME LIKE 'BLAP%' it stores that resultset. If someone else comes and runs
either of them, only a direct match will pull my prior results.

It's okay, but it's no big win or case study.

