I had hoped that this article would be a focused point by point response to the anonymous pastebin rant.<p>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.<p>"<i>... 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>"<p>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.<p>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of participation in order to discover a consensus which seems to be that many of the claims were overblown or based on out-of-date information, but some were real.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,<p>"<i>... 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."</i>"<p>Rather than feeling disappointed, the newsworthy aspect of this episode is <i>how well</i> 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.<p>It would have been nice if ReadWriteWeb focused on that rather than attempting to paint a negative picture of community sourced news.
The main point of the Pastebin rant is the claim that Mongo's development standards are insufficient for mission-critical software (such as databases).<p>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" <a href="https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3866" rel="nofollow">https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3866</a><p>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....
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.<p>If MongoDB makes it possible for you to do something unique, that no other proven solution would allow, it might be worth the risk.<p>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.
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.
<i>A single-sourced, anonymous, piece like this one wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) be making the front page of widely read publications.</i><p>Is this something HN can fix?<p>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)?
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.<p>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 <i>ranter</i>) is going to have problems.
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...<p>What matters is what kind of mission the software successfully accomplished and how.