Episode 1 - Mongo DB Is Web Scale

I'm reminded of the "MongoDB is WebScale" video: as of this moment I officially resigned from my job as software engineer and will take up work on the farm shoveling pig shit and administering anal suppositories to sick horses because that will be a thousand times more tolerable than being in the same industry as dipshits like you ▶ this video

Who cares about stars on Github??? "If dev null is fast and webscale I will use it" "Does dev null support sharding" Who remembers ▶ this video

> Majority of projects don't need the web scale or whatever. Truth. All the major cloud platform marketing is YAGNI but for infrastructure instead of libraries/code. As someone who works in ops and has since starting as a sysadmin in the early 00s, it's been entertaining to say the least to watch everyone rediscover hosting your own stuff as if it's some new innovation and wasn't ever possible before. It's like that old MongoDB is web scale video ( ▶ this video ) Watching devs discover Docker was similarly entertaining back then when us in ops have been using LXC and BSD jails, etc. to containerize code pre-DevOps. Anyway, all that to say - go buy your gray beard sysadmins a coffee let them help you. We would all be thrilled to bring stuff back on-prem or go back to self hosting and running infra again and probably have a few tricks to teach you.

But with a hour long video, how do you know if the content is any good? With text I can skim around the headings and images and see at a glance how deep the author is going into the subject. In that specific video the first 30 minutes is related to everything but the new Web Scale[0] LLM native database the author is "moving to" from SQL. Meanwhile Postgresql is just chugging along and over-performing all of them. [0] ▶ this video

I think "the reality", at least as something involving a new paradigm, has yet to be established. I'll note that I heard plenty of similar talk about how developers just couldn't adapt six months or more ago. Promoters now can admit those tools were in fact pretty bad, because they now have something else to promote, but at the time those not rawdogging LLMs were dinosaurs under a big meteor. I do of course agree that some people are just refusing to "wrap their minds around the changing world". But anybody with enough experience in tech can count a lot more instances of "the world is about to change" than "the world really changed". The most recent obvious example being cryptocurrencies, but there are plenty of others. [1] So I think there's plenty of room here for legitimate skepticism. And for just waiting until things settle down to see where we ended up. [1] E.g. ▶ this video

About 15 years ago or so, webscale was everything and MongoDB was webscale[1][2] hence being used everywhere. Has it become a legacy product, or are there still good reasons for using it in a new project in 2025? [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link

I used to mispronounce Redis too and I fully fault the "MongoDB is web scale"[0] video for that. Glad I'm not alone heh [0]: ▶ this video

Every time I hear a programmer has taken up farming I think of this moment from "MongoDB Is Web Scale": ▶ this video Not a bad idea, actually.

I'm not looking forward to having to argue with a coworker that thinks MongoDB is web scale because ChatGPT told them so. It will be a hell of a lot more annoying than[1] [1] ▶ this video

I wonder if you've ever seen this classic video mocking such marketing claims which is called "MongoDB is Web Scale": ▶ this video

> I understand “web scale” in the marketing term Mongo sense That's the joke. (And for anyone who hasn't seen it: ▶ this video )

"Mongo DB is a web scale DB and doesn't use SQL or Joins so it's high-performance. Everybody knows that relational DBs don't scale because they use Joins and Write-To-Disk." ▶ this video

Glad you liked it! The reference to this series of videos was intended of course. The specific video I had in mind was actually ▶ this video Enjoy!

The hvasilev's comment got flagged and I could not reply to it anymore, so I'll reply here (sorry) and copy-paste the hvasilev's comment verbatim below, for the sake of commenting on it's claims: --- Reality is not on the side of this language. 11 year old, has a very low adoption with virtually no jobs associated. ( link ) On the other hand if you search for "Rust" in the latest "Who wants to be hired?" thread, you will see it is quite popular with unemployed people. The reality is that the language has a lot of friction, the ergonomics are bad, the syntax is heavy and some poor decision making has been made there for a systems-level programming language. There are a lot of ideological traps in this industry and many people that fall for them. Why people are interested in ideologies and cults is beyond me. [ A screenshot: link ] --- <rant> Now my comments on the issues mentioned in the hvasilev's comment. > Reality is not on the side of this language. 11 year old, has a very low adoption with virtually no jobs associated. ( link ) Tiobe index is shit. The most flattering thing I've read about it states that it (poorly) depicts quantity of educational materials available online for particular programming language. Unfortunate naming of programming languages after letters of alphabet, symbols (++, #) and real-life stuff (like islands) doesn't help this rating either. That said, Rust isn't that popular and isn't growing much according to other better language ratings: 1.

The "Mongo DB is Web Scale" video just turned 10 years old. I'm pretty sure that was a big factor in MongoDB not being taken seriously by many people. ▶ this video

Some readers might not be familiar with that particular meme: ▶ this video IMHO it perfectly describes the hype-reality disconnect at the early days of MongoDB. Yeah it was that bad. Mongo has improved since, the hype has toned down and the NoSQL space is more crowded these days.

From what I've observed, the "crowd" is easily seduced by performance above all other concerns - correctness, security, science, etc. NoSQL was invented and gained popularity b/c it originally was easier to scale via sharding, and that was seductive enough [1] to give it industry momentum. While performance is a feature, it seemed many folks originally advocating NoSQL did not understand or appreciate the mathematical foundations of the relational model. A decade of experience seems to be driving zeitgeist back to scientific fundamentals. [1]: ▶ this video

And on that theme, then get ready for when your boss gets to the part about how NoSQL gives you: "Rapid development. If you’re developing within two-week Agile sprints, cranking out quick iterations, or needing to make frequent updates to the data structure without a lot of downtime between versions, a relational database will slow you down." Reminds me of this classic ▶ this video

"Learn X in Y minutes" is an awesome concept! Let me know if you ever decide to run with it. I guess I don't fit the CoffeeScript is a hipster language profile very well but I still enjoy writing code in it ;) I basically agree with everything you've said (in both posts) ... you can be successful while wasting cycles. And if you're working on a low-volume and/or internal only application, you'll probably never face the limits of a modern server. If you need to operate "at web scale" [1], or run into an uncommon (or common) bug, you'll need to know more about the frameworks and systems you're code relies on (e.g. MongoDB configuration for systems over 2GB [2]). Blog posts like the one referenced are completely unfair to those that developed MongoDB - read the manual and understand how MongoDB works OR use it at your own risk. So I'll switch arguments and help you make your point. We have an application written in Oracle's Application Express - while we have extensive expertise in Oracle's database software, we have this one system which was completed for expediency's sake. It's kind of horrific but (mostly) works at the scale required. It would be financially foolish to dig into more deeply into ApEx for this one dead-end application. Everyone is happy. [1] ▶ this video (audio NSFW) [2] link

I don't like MySQL either. But it's probably the perfect choice. Or perhaps you think something webscale[1] is required? [1] ▶ this video