These posts are exceptionally well-timed for me. I'm currently wrangling with one of those problems that is just not solved well with relational databases, or even the flat document store that my company already uses. I've been looking hard at Redis and Mongo, and of late I'm leaning towards Mongo. You know what? Having read these posts and the threads - and having extracted what little in the way of factual datapoints I could from them - I'm pretty sure I'll still be riding into production with Mongo.

Some of you guys who were all aboard the NOSQL UBER ALLES hype train a year or two ago now seem to be swinging back - with scrapes and bruises from some truly harebrained misdeployments, no doubt - to a reactionary 'All NoSQL are doomed to reimplement everything relational' nihilism. Back to shitty OR tools and ugly-ass joins for everyone, damnit! Harumph. I could write a novel just quoting and responding to some of the stupid pronouncements and prescriptions for correctness on these Mongo threads' comments.

Anyways. With regards to this specific post:

Let's rewind a couple of years. I work for a significantly smaller company than our anon raconteur, from the sound of it. At roughly the same time as he adopted Mongo, I was also looking hard at it, to solve some problems where the relational options available to us weren't going to cut the mustard. Damn, did Mongo look cool, fun even. The flexibility of having arbitrary object graphs in it and querying down into subdocument properties with real indexing on them, well, it sets nearly any developer's heart a-flutter, particularly those of us who work on dynamic web stuff a fair bit.

Sadly, I have to be an engineer and pragmatist first, I have to think about much more than what is sexy and comfortable for devs. I've been through my share of 3AM wake-up world-enders, I've learned the hard lessons. I considered variables like basic maintainability by ops people, credibility of the vendor, track record, robust redundancy and availability solutions, how far up shit creek we'd be in a disaster recovery scenario, etc. And after thorough research I decided that, for my much smaller company which can afford to be judiciously bleeding-edge where it makes sense to, Mongo was just not clearing the bar. I sucked it up and used unsexy properly normalized relational database tables, then utilized memory caching and async updates to try and paper over the performance issues inherent in that scheme.

What was anon doing? Charging full steam ahead into the wild unknown with Mongo, on an effort that was apparently important to a userbase of millions at a "high profile" company. That's some mighty responsible stewardship of the company, or even just the IT department's, broader concerns right there. Now, I understand that it totally makes sense to have used Mongo 1.x as a scrappy startup on a greenfield project, no problem. But this guy was in a different situation. At that scale in a BFC, conservatism rules, and it rules for a reason.

I think I am starting to understand why anon is anon.

In any case, we're likely going to roll with Mongo soon. It is indeed maturing, and I'm a lot more comfortable with it on all of my criteria these days. I have possibly read more of the JIRA issues than some of the devs, and they are prioritizing the Right Things - at least for my tastes. By my estimation it is on the right track.

Even having not used it in production yet, I can identify some things people are complaining about here as complete and utter RTFM-fail, misunderstanding of what it is they're deploying and whether what they expect out of it is realistic before they begin. I understand the tradeoffs of Mongo, and in my particular situation they make good sense.