How many people have ever complained about a new technology only to discover later that it works fine, you just weren’t using it correctly?  In the InfoWorld article “Ill-informed Haters Go After MongoDB” Andrew Oliver offers a comical view of how this very thing happens all the time in the professional technology world.

With any new technology comes a wave of marketing happy talk, which in turn leads to inexperienced developers ‘jumping on the train’ of a new fad. Inevitably, these newbies find themselves disappointed that the technology doesn’t deliver on their inflated expectations.

His first example is the NoSQL movement and the backlash that it has been experiencing on the blogs lately. He brings up the piece “Why I migrated from MongoDB” by Siddharth Sharma.  Sharna felt that MongoDB failed to meet his search needs and chose PostgresSQL instead.  Oliver points out that MongoDB is not really designed for search and though it does offer search if you are looking for a great search tool you need to look at a search engine such as Solr/Lucene.   Though PostgresSQL offers search Oliver still feels it can’t compare to Solr.  Seems like LucidWorks, which uses the Lucene/Solr platform would have been an even better fit.  Oliver gives a few more amusing examples of how users expect MongoDB to work miracles.  However, all jokes aside he brings up a good point.

Take these blogs with a bucket of salt and make sure you understand the technology before using it on a critical project. If you don’t heed this advice, some writer for InfoWorld on a short deadline in a slow news week might decide to ridicule you!

Oliver definitely gives readers plenty of laughs but he also gives an important and simple message.  Check before you buy.

April Holmes, October 17,  2012

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