On multi-form data

I read an excellent debrief on a startup’s experience with MongoDB, called “A Year with MongoDB”.

It was excellent due to its level of detail. Some of its points are important — particularly global write lock and uncompressed field names, both issues that needlessly afflict large MongoDB clusters and will likely be fixed eventually.

However, it’s also pretty clear from this post that they were not using MongoDB in the best way. For example, in a small part of their criticism of “safe off by default”, they write:

We lost a sizable amount of data at Kiip for some time before realizing what was happening and using safe saves where they made sense (user accounts, billing, etc.).

You shouldn’t be storing user accounts and billing information in MongoDB. Perhaps MongoDB’s marketing made you believe you should store everything in MongoDB, but you should know better.

In addition to that data being highly relational, it also requires the transactional semantics present in mature relational databases. When I read “user accounts, billing” here, I cringed.

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