

Broken by Design: MongoDB Fault Tolerance - aydinhan
http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/

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prodigal_erik
We keep seeing people in the industry with a reckless contempt for
reliability. Rather than the next gamified mobile social network for cat
videos, why do they choose to build _databases_ of all things? Do they just
want to be popular among a bunch of founders of moribund startups who don't
have large enough scale or good enough analytics to notice how their storage
has permanently corrupted their data? Did they just _not know_ that write(2)
on a socket doesn't wait for a TCP ACK, and not ever tcpdump their protocol?

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podman
Broken is pretty subjective here and greatly depends on one's needs as far as
the ACID principles are concerned. If durability is your primary concern then
maybe MongoDB isn't for you. That doesn't mean it's broken. It might perfectly
meet the needs of others. I guess it should also be noted that the author
works on HyperDex (a competing data store).

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jmix
If a data store touted as fault-tolerant isn't fault-tolerant, it's broken.

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swdunlop
TL;DR -- If you don't use safe mode / write concerns, writes are not safe.

~~~
genwin
and (from the article) if you do use safe mode, MongoDB is a lot slower and
can no longer finish the entire benchmark suite in the time allotted.

