MongoDB lessons(arbiesamong.com)
arbiesamong.com
MongoDB lessons
http://arbiesamong.com/mongodb-lessons-or-how-not-to-f-up-hard-when
7 comments
The author couldn't be more right about picking an asynchronous driver. It makes me wonder how long it will take for the official MongoDB drivers to adopt this approach too. I've been using ReactiveMongo for Scala for the past two months and would recommend it without hesitation.
Asynchronous driver isn't always needed, but he was working with Tornado, an asynchronous framework. Using anything non asynchronous that has the possibility to block for any significant period of time (i.e. network call or database call) with tornado defeats the whole purpose. Hardly MongoDB's fault.
Anyone care the explain "2. Create your indexes as you develop." a little deeper.
I'm guessing the authors deployed to production with no indexes on their collections. This means the cost of most queries was probably O(n). This could go unnoticed in development where N is small, but is unacceptable once you have any real data. I think they are recommending thinking about and adding indexes while you are developing as opposed to trying to do so post-hoc, once queries are taking tens of seconds.
MongoDB is basically unusable without indexes even under the slightest load.
This makes me think that the author didn't put enough effort into determining the right solution for this problem. Using something like MongoDB requires experience too, which the author lacked.