FerretDB 1.0 offers fresh approach to open source document databases

Halfway up a Himalayan mountain might not be the usual place to start a database company but then maybe FerretDB is not a usual company. Announcing the GA of FerretDB 1.0 this week, the company has its sights on MongoDB, the document database much beloved of developers looking for a friendly system with flexible schema. It …

[Korev]

But is it webscale?

Sorry, but someone had to post it...

[Bitsminer]

mongo

It had/has a cool name which is why an lot of people adopted it.

But they had no idea it was really an in-memory database with inconsistent writes.

We accidently purchased a backup solution that did de-duplication and file-structure virtualization. Yep, you guess it, based on MongoDB, where all the backup data was stored. The memory sizing advice from the vendor was approximately equal to the number of (Windows) clients times 4GB each. Have 100 clients, have half a terabyte of RAM (remember you can only purchase halves or quarters, not fractions.)

We non-accidently shipped to a few customers (as part of a much larger system) and boy were we embarrassed. The backups failed to complete because the VM hosting the backup software locked up for lack of memory (we gave it 16GB for five clients. Five.) (It spent all it's time paging to the database files. Seems "dedup" meant "compare and contrast with the entire set of blocks ever seen.)

And some customers of course noticed, mostly because the status was on the dashboard we supplied.

Oopsies....time to retire!

(I think the second, or third parameter of PostgresSQL server configuration is....how much memory it can have! That is exactly what is needed. Good luck to the folks at FerretDB, they have a lot TAM to address here.)

[emfiliane]

Re: mongo

I don't think it's entirely fair to lay a shit programmer's abuse at the database's feet, but it's also true that Mongo has earned the well-deserved reputation that PHP and mysql once had: If you make it so easy that any idiot can use it, then every idiot will use and abuse it.

[Julz]

Re: mongo

Hum, perhaps making sure idiots can't fuck things up too much is a better ambition for computer software design; especially for operating systems, databases and programming languages. It was certainly the approach taken by developers of mainframe operating systems and many databases and languages developed in the seventies and eighties. We, of course, do things better now.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: mongo

The description to me sounded a lot like this is a MongoDB compatible engine that sits on top of Postgres: it receives all the JSON and hands it over the Postgres to manage but lets the developers continue to work in their combined application/data layer. I can see the attraction.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: mongo

PHP and MySQL still have that reputation. In fact, PHP will probably go the grave with it. It's now mainly in legacy mode with more and more large projects migrating from it so at some point they'll just be WordPress, Typo3, Joomla and the like left.

Selling a DB on the basis that you don't need to worry about schemas, which is exactly what MongoDB did, will attract people who don't want to know or care about schemas until, inevitaby, all their data goes to shit.

[katrinab]

Re: mongo

I would not store all the backup data on MongoDB.

If I was to involve the use of MongoDB here, I would store the actual backup data on the filesystem, and store file names + additional information on the database.. Though I don't understand why you would use Mongo rather than an SQL database in this scenario. None of the benefits that Mongo has over it seem to be applicable here.