Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, yes, another dispatch from the digital frontier. One finds it difficult to muster surprise. The industry, in its infinite, venture-funded wisdom, has once again discovered that building a data store upon a foundation of sand, wishful thinking, and a profound ignorance of first principles eventually leads to... well, this. This "mongobleed." The name alone is an offense to the sensibilities—a marketing term for what is, fundamentally, a failure of engineering. Let us dissect this latest kerfuffle, shall we?
One must first address the proximate cause: a vulnerability in network compression. And why, pray tell, must they compress and shuttle entire novellas of unstructured JSON across the wire? Because they've abandoned the sublime elegance of Dr. Codd's relational model. Instead of performing surgical JOIN operations on normalized, well-structured data, they are forced to ship the entire, bloated "document" hither and thither. This isn't a bug in zlib; it's a symptom of a catastrophic architectural decision made a decade ago by people who thought the Third Normal Form was a prog-rock band.
This obsession with “developer velocity” has led them to champion so-called "schemaless" design. This is not a feature; it is an abdication of responsibility. They've replaced the rigorous discipline of a data definition language with the digital equivalent of scribbling on a napkin and hoping for the best. The database, which ought to be the steadfast guardian of data integrity, is reduced to a permissive simpleton that happily accepts any malformed nonsense you throw at it. It's like arguing for anarchy on the basis that it makes it easier to leave the house in the morning.
Of course, they will bleat on about web scale and the CAP theorem, as if they are the first to have discovered it. They wave it around like a talisman to excuse their cavalier abandonment of Consistency. They saw the trade-off between Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance and decided that the "C" in ACID was merely a suggestion.
"We'll just be... eventually consistent!" A charmingly optimistic way of saying “presently incorrect.” Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the trade-offs in database architectures, or they'd understand that you don't simply discard consistency; you manage it with deliberate, intelligent design, not just hope.
And what of their vaunted query "language"? It is a grotesque mockery. An unholy tangle of nested braces and inscrutable operators that makes one long for the clean, declarative power of SQL. They took a solved problem—a mathematically complete, human-readable language for data manipulation—and replaced it with a system that is both less powerful and infinitely more obtuse. It is a testament to the fact that if you give a programmer enough JavaScript, they will eventually recreate a database, only worse.
Honestly, one grows weary. They have spent billions of dollars and countless engineering hours to build systems that are less reliable, less consistent, and, as we see today, less secure than what we perfected in the 1980s. I suppose I shall return to my lecture notes on relational algebra. At least there, the world still makes sense.