[calpaterson]

It's pretty incredible that the author of a post called "I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try. In Ten Years." criticises a comment on this same post telling him to read the tutorial all the way through as "unnecessarily aggressive".

Aside from that, though, the 32 bit limitation is clear in the documentation and present on the download page. It's fine not to read the documentation before you use something but you can't then complain that it did something you did not expect. Mongodb is a little different from other databases. So is Redis. You can't blow everything off that is conceptually different.

[diego]

See my comment below. If you use a package manager you never see the warning.

[matthewcford]

One would presume, if you're going to use a database you would check it's limitations first, this one is well documented.

There are plenty of valid arguments for not using MongoDB, but this is the weakest I have seen so far.

[jonny_eh]

I don't think his problem was the size limit, it was the lack of exceptions being raised or log errors being recorded.

[manuscreationis]

This may be a case when using the package manager is not always the best option.

If you're talking about Ubuntu, I can attest that the default PM there is several versions out of date for a lot of things, and thus to get the version you'd expect, you're forced to install by hand.

Also, even using the PM version, didn't you get a warning when you started the server? I thought Mongo threw up a warning at start time about this exact issue (the 2GB limitation, not the silent failures)

[kombine]

Second every word here. The version in the Ubuntu's repositories is not the latest(which is 2.2) and they can't be more explicit about it than pointing it out on the download page and giving a message upon the database startup.

[smacktoward]

The version in the Ubuntu's repositories is not the latest(which is 2.2)

What does the author's complaint have to do with the version Ubuntu is distributing? Are the 32-bit limitations present in Ubuntu's version not present in the most recent version? If they are, than who cares which of them he installed?

they can't be more explicit about it than pointing it out on the download page and giving a message upon the database startup

Uhh, yeah they can. On Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu you can make your .deb packages throw up dialogs that the user has to read and agree to before installation via debconf (http://www.fifi.org/cgi-bin/man2html/usr/share/man/man8/debc...). There's probably a way to do the same thing in RPM-based systems as well. If the warning is something that every user of the software needs to see, putting up a warning dialog and requiring the user to confirm having seen it before installation starts would probably be appropriate.

They could also write an error to the database's error log whenever data is discarded due to the 32-bit limitation. Someone mentioned above that it puts a message at the start of the log, but if that's the case IMO it's insufficient; most of the time people interact with logs by looking in them for a particular moment in time, not by reading them from the first line on. Logging the error on or near the moment the data loss happens would make the issue visible to people using logs in this manner.

[lmm]

>Uhh, yeah they can. On Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu you can make your .deb packages throw up dialogs that the user has to read and agree to before installation via debconf (http://www.fifi.org/cgi-bin/man2html/usr/share/man/man8/debc...). There's probably a way to do the same thing in RPM-based systems as well. If the warning is something that every user of the software needs to see, putting up a warning dialog and requiring the user to confirm having seen it before installation starts would probably be appropriate.

Right, but the only person with the ability to do that is the Ubuntu maintainer of the package. Mongodb has no control over what they do and should not be held responsible for their actions.

[desas]

> [debconf] There's probably a way to do the same thing in RPM-based systems

Nope. In fact fedora developed packagekit said the idea was broken and caused a controversy over supporting it for ages

[true_religion]

Maybe.... just maybe you should read the documentation of the database you're installing before you actually start using it in production.

I'm sure this only bit the author because he was using MongoDB for a toy project, and in a real system he'd have done due diligence first.

I'm not a fan of MongoDB myself, but if I were to use it I know that I must read about every option available because by default MongoDB's team chose settings that are suited for speed and not reliability, durability, or (if i'm being less charitable) even sanity.