After seeing the raft of Twitter traffic on MongoDB and Riak, In Context (and an apology), I just had to look. The thought of someone being honest on the Internet being even more novel than someone being wrong on the Internet.
At least I would not have to stay up late correcting them. 😉
Sean Cribbs writes:
There has been quite a bit of furor and excitement on the Internet this week regarding some very public criticisms (and defenses) of MongoDB and its creators, 10gen. Unfortunately, a ghost from my recent past also resurfaced as a result. Let me begin by apologizing to 10gen and its engineers for what I said at JSConf, and then I will reframe my comments in a more constructive form.
Mea culpa. It’s way too easy in our industry to set up and knock down strawmen, as I did, than to convey messages of objective and constructive criticism. It’s also too easy, when you are passionate about what you believe in, to ignore the feelings and efforts of others, which I did. I have great respect for the engineers I have met from 10gen, Mathias Stern and Kyle Banker. They are friendly, approachable, helpful and fun to socialize with at conferences. Thanks for being stand-up guys.
Also, whether we like it or not, these kinds of public embarrassments have rippling effects across the whole NoSQL ecosystem. While Basho has tried to distance itself from other players in the NoSQL field, we cannot deny our origins, and the ecosystem as a “thing” is only about 3 years old. Are developers, technical managers and CTOs more wary of new database technologies as a result of these embarrassments? Probably. Should we continue to work hard to develop and promote alternative data-storage solutions? Absolutely.
Sean’s following comments are useful but even more useful was his suggestion that both MongoDB and Riak push to improve their respective capabilities. There is always room for improvement.
Oh, I did notice on thing that needs correcting in Sean’s blog entry. 😉 See: Munnecke, Heath Records and VistA (NoSQL 35 years old?) NoSQL is at least 35 years old, probably longer but I don’t have the citation at hand.