Dear MongoDB users, we welcome you in Azure DocumentDB

[morghus]

Yes, except you can't do the most basic things with DocumentDB and it becomes very expensive very fast. Especially if you want multiple collections.

There's a lot lacking with DocumentDB, as evident from the feedback forum, that comparing it to Mongo is like comparing an infant to an adult. The infant might be cute, but it can't do a whole lot.

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/263030-documentdb/filters/...

[youdontknowtho]

To build something similarly sized with the free version of Mongo would also be expensive. It's a trade off.

[mat_keep]

When users have evaluated DocumentDB against MongoDB, they see major shortcomings in Microsoft's offering:

"As we were developing our new financial benchmarking service last year, we evaluated Microsoft’s Azure DocumentDB, but MongoDB offered much richer query and indexing functionality"

KPMG France https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/kpmg-france-enters-the-clo...

[redwood]

All of the following three share something in common: 1) Microsoft Azure DocumentDB 2) Google Cloud Spanner 3) Amazon Web Services DynamoDB

Total cloud-vendor lock-in. It's clear why the clouds want users investing in these difficult-to-migrate-from solutions...

[curiousDog]

Needs more hashtags. Reach all those Millenials graduating $10k 3-month bootcamps. Sigh.

[camus2]

lol, yeah, this marketing piece doesn't really feel professional. It is littered with useless illustrations and bad poetry.

> Third, we do it with love…

With love for our money sure. What the hell does that even mean? I really rolled my eyes reading that blog post. This is childish and out of place for an article trying to sell security.

[fb03]

It's really satisfying when I read some post with what I exactly wanted to write but didn't have the balls to. Thank you :)

[flintchip]

What a sweeping generalisation to make.

[verandaguy]

I've been out of touch with Mongo for a while, but when did it stop being common practice to just hide :27017 behind a firewall with only your app's DB access layer (or, at most, a few nodes in the local subnet) talking to it?

[laurentdc]

Probably around the same time ops were deemed useless :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13644789

[y0ghur7_xxx]

> hide :27017 behind a firewall with only your app's DB access layer talking to it?

Because if you can do without it, why bother? Developing an access layer costs time and money. If you can leverage the DB features to do what you need, you can make you stack simpler and more maintainable.

[ec109685]

One of the best things about AWS is the "Jeff Barr style" posts describing every service they release. I find them much easier to consume than a blog post like this.

[zip1234]

Well, this post was a marketing post, not a product release. Product release posts in Azure are much more informative for a dev that this post.

[hoodoof]

AWS needs something like this.

The missing piece for the AWS serverless story is a database that is suitable for writing real world applications. DynamoDB is far from suitable for that task, which leaves AWS serverless with no good database.

[kiallmacinnes]

AWS has RDS - That's most certainly a database suitable for writing real world applications as its MySQL.

Does serverless somehow mandate a non SQL solution?

[cyberferret]

Yeah, I dabbled in DynamoDB for a recent project - couldn't really get my head around it - very strange sort of NoSQL database. The query language is incredibly arcane and wordy, and mostly inflexible.

Thinking of setting up an EC2 instance running RethinkDB or PouchDB for my project (and for future projects).

[ZGF4]

Cross datacenter replication is the missing piece from AWS. I wish they'd just roll out a hosted Cassandra or something identical

[hayd]

> DynamoDB is far from suitable for that task

why?

[steve918]

DynamoDB would be pretty close if it just allowed null values.

[etoykan]

I think Microsoft should implement basic aggregation functions first.

[ZGF4]

Implementing aggregation at query time is a temporary solution. For systems like this aggregation should be done on insert time - many hugely popular databases do not provide much more than a basic get operation for this reason

[searchfaster]

Interesting... So compatible with Mongodb protocol but not using mongodb internally ?

What is your view of services, which provide functionality of some other software or SAAS and is API / Protocol compatible ?

Can API / protocols be copyrighted or patented? I believe not based on Google vs Oracle.

[willvarfar]

Hasn't tokuMX already put a 'proper' solid DB behind the mongo API?

[supremesaboteur]

> First and foremost, security is our priority

In response to https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/09/mongodb/ ?

"MongoDB databases are being decimated in soaring ransomware attacks that have seen the number of compromised systems more than double to 27,000 in a day."

[alexyoung]

As someone that almost got bitten by MongoDB's lax auth defaults, I was happy to read that DocumentDB has enabled access control out of the box and no default username/password.

Also, there's a query playground if you want to try it out quickly: https://www.documentdb.com/sql/demo

[raverbashing]

It's important to be aware of security implications of leaving an unauthenticated server listening on the open internet (listening on 0.0.0.0 is not the default since some time now and if installing the rpm/deb package listening on 127.0.0.1 is the default option). Also never leave an internet facing server without a firewall.

As a SaaS it's not surprising DocumentDB got security configured, and it also won't be surprising when people lose data because they'll put '123456' as their password or commit their password to a public repository

[EpicEng]

Of course, you really shouldn't be exposing databases if you don't know how to administer them. I agree that the defaults should be better, but...

[vikestep]

We used to use DocumentDB, but switched to Azure Table Storage a while back. Did some benchmarking and DocumentDB was too slow for our needs (getting documents for a range between two epochs). Not sure if others experienced the same thing or if things have gotten better since then though.

[dirkg]

Never looked at DocumentDB before. So if I get this straight, I can get a fully managed DB that can scale easily, but still have all the advantages and compatibility of a regular NoSQL like Mongo?

I think that's a first, right?

[redwood]

Except that the advantages and compatibility are not all there. Plus there are now fully managed options for the real thing.

[willvarfar]

Percona have their drop-in MongoDB replacement that uses TokuMX under the hood and they'll manage it for you.

[fergie]

Isn't it the same general idea as Amazon's DynamoDB?

[doublerebel]

Fully managed easily scalable nosql DBs have been available for many years as CouchDB variants from multiple providers.

[al2o3cr]

I hear it's got even better write performance than /dev/null ;)

[rdiddly]

Potter's paying 50 cents on the dollar for your shares in the Building & Loan...

[trustfundbaby]

From frying pan to fire probably.

[z0noxz]

Trading privacy for a false sense of security, are we?

[Oletros]

Trading privacy? Can you elaborate?

[joe563323]

Microsoft trying hard to get developers to work on their platform and fail has really become very much fun. Microsoft deserves for being evil. Example: Microsoft does not save history in cmd shell(its so irritating for devs). The height of the cruelty is they aliased the curl and wget by default to its own program(do not remember).

[bpicolo]

Having a subpar shell application is evil?