[granitepail]

I saw the article as more of a reaction to all of the technical (and often times inane) blog posts about why company x uses technology y.

The main points I took away from the article were:

- They did their homework, and - They knew that, even though it is not the most widely known technology stack, they were seeking the kind of engineer who would not only be able to pick it up, but understand their rational for choosing it

And it seems as though they've been successful! As engineers, most of us are interested in the many interesting technologies available to us, so much so that, when examining a company like Basho, many of us ask "Why Erlang?" before we ask "What are you making and why?"

Without putting words in their mouth, it is my impression that Basho sought to create an incredibly powerful and easily scalable database. They chose Erlang because it was, in their opinion, the tool for the job. As I see it, 10gen got the ball rolling towards approachable scaling/development and now Basho and the team behind RethinkDB are trying to improve by creating systems free of MongoDB's many limitations.

[leif]

What do you see as MongoDB's limitations, and are any/most of them solved by (the product I work on,) TokuMX[1]?

[1]: http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokumx-for-mongodb/

[granitepail]

You guys seem like a step in the right direction! The improved locking, in particular. Sharding is still a nasty issue w/ MongoDB.

[coffeemug]

I'm the founder @ Rethink. Just to clarify, we don't see approachability and scalability as a dichotomy, we think one could do both really well. There are of course some tradeoffs involved (which is why the [awesome] team @ Basho chose a dynamo-style system and we chose a master-slave type system), but in the grand scheme of things, high scale and approachability are definitely possible and we (and possibly others) are going to make it happen.

[granitepail]

Yeah! Exactly! Sorry if it was unclear, but what I meant was that I saw the latest wave of DBs (Rethink + Riak) as finally letting the administration & scalability side catch up to the programmer approachability side. Anyone with significant experience knows sharding MongoDB can be a massive pain. Sharding Cassandra is easier, but it certainly lacks the juicy programmer interfaces provided by more modern solutions. I'm very excited about the work you guys are doing.