Episode 1 - Mongo DB Is Web Scale

Who cares about stars on Github??? "If dev null is fast and webscale I will use it" "Does dev null support sharding" Who remembers ▶ this video

I'm reminded of the "MongoDB is WebScale" video: as of this moment I officially resigned from my job as software engineer and will take up work on the farm shoveling pig shit and administering anal suppositories to sick horses because that will be a thousand times more tolerable than being in the same industry as dipshits like you ▶ this video

> Majority of projects don't need the web scale or whatever. Truth. All the major cloud platform marketing is YAGNI but for infrastructure instead of libraries/code. As someone who works in ops and has since starting as a sysadmin in the early 00s, it's been entertaining to say the least to watch everyone rediscover hosting your own stuff as if it's some new innovation and wasn't ever possible before. It's like that old MongoDB is web scale video ( ▶ this video ) Watching devs discover Docker was similarly entertaining back then when us in ops have been using LXC and BSD jails, etc. to containerize code pre-DevOps. Anyway, all that to say - go buy your gray beard sysadmins a coffee let them help you. We would all be thrilled to bring stuff back on-prem or go back to self hosting and running infra again and probably have a few tricks to teach you.

But with a hour long video, how do you know if the content is any good? With text I can skim around the headings and images and see at a glance how deep the author is going into the subject. In that specific video the first 30 minutes is related to everything but the new Web Scale[0] LLM native database the author is "moving to" from SQL. Meanwhile Postgresql is just chugging along and over-performing all of them. [0] ▶ this video

About 15 years ago or so, webscale was everything and MongoDB was webscale[1][2] hence being used everywhere. Has it become a legacy product, or are there still good reasons for using it in a new project in 2025? [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link

I think "the reality", at least as something involving a new paradigm, has yet to be established. I'll note that I heard plenty of similar talk about how developers just couldn't adapt six months or more ago. Promoters now can admit those tools were in fact pretty bad, because they now have something else to promote, but at the time those not rawdogging LLMs were dinosaurs under a big meteor. I do of course agree that some people are just refusing to "wrap their minds around the changing world". But anybody with enough experience in tech can count a lot more instances of "the world is about to change" than "the world really changed". The most recent obvious example being cryptocurrencies, but there are plenty of others. [1] So I think there's plenty of room here for legitimate skepticism. And for just waiting until things settle down to see where we ended up. [1] E.g. ▶ this video

I used to mispronounce Redis too and I fully fault the "MongoDB is web scale"[0] video for that. Glad I'm not alone heh [0]: ▶ this video

Every time I hear a programmer has taken up farming I think of this moment from "MongoDB Is Web Scale": ▶ this video Not a bad idea, actually.

I'm not looking forward to having to argue with a coworker that thinks MongoDB is web scale because ChatGPT told them so. It will be a hell of a lot more annoying than[1] [1] ▶ this video

I wonder if you've ever seen this classic video mocking such marketing claims which is called "MongoDB is Web Scale": ▶ this video

> I understand “web scale” in the marketing term Mongo sense That's the joke. (And for anyone who hasn't seen it: ▶ this video )

"Mongo DB is a web scale DB and doesn't use SQL or Joins so it's high-performance. Everybody knows that relational DBs don't scale because they use Joins and Write-To-Disk." ▶ this video