• Home
  • My Favorite Topics
    • Blogging
    • Business
    • Career
    • Cars
    • Consulting
    • Epic Life Quest
    • Iceland
    • Marketing
    • Presenting
    • Productivity
  • My Life Quest
    • Future Achievements
  • About Me
  • My Recent Photos

Guess the Bug Source: Microsoft SQL Server or MongoDB?

8 years ago
bugs, microsoft, mongodb, SQL Server
6 Comments
In the green trunks...
In the green trunks…

In database-land, MongoDB is the butt of a lot of jokes, but is it really any worse than mainstream databases like Microsoft SQL Server?

I’ll list pairs of bugs, and you have to guess whether it’s in MongoDB or SQL Server. You can click on the bug to learn the answer.

Question 1: Careful With That Monitoring:

  • Profiling the server causes it to crash
  • Querying instrumentation tables causes the database server to crash

Question 2: Locking Up the Shop:

  • Database server stops responding while it’s writing to disk
  • Copying tinyint data from one table to another locks up the entire server

Question 3: Random Query Results That Won’t Be Fixed:

  • Generating a random number in a query makes it produce a random number of rows, too, and it won’t be fixed because the vendor says the current behavior is “good for 99% of cases”
  • You can’t get a random row from a result set, and it won’t be fixed

Question 4: Who’s Watching the Watcher:

  • Replication instrumentation tables stop working when you need them most
  • Doing an outer join between instrumentation tables causes a crash

Question 5: Easy With Those Index Rebuilds:

  • Concurrency during an index rebuild causes corruption
  • Concurrency during an index rebuild causes corruption

Question 6: This Just In – New Virtualization Bugs from Last Week:

  • Backups taken under certain versions of VMware are completely corrupt and unrecoverable (and here’s a better description that requires a Google login – if you get a login form, log in, and then click this link again)
  • In virtualization, databases don’t always come online (scroll down to Issue 2)

After this little experiment, I dunno about you, but I’m not going to be so quick to poke fun at MongoDB.

bugs, microsoft, mongodb, SQL Server
Previous Post
Why I Don’t Own a Tesla (Yet)
Next Post
On Business

6 Comments. Leave new

  • George Stocker
    October 21, 2014 10:11 am

    This is a wonderful blog post. It reminds me that I shouldn’t be so quick to make fun of other people’s code.

    As Scott Hanselman once said: Everything is broken and no one cares:

    http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUpset.aspx

    Reply
    • Brent
      October 21, 2014 10:53 am

      George – thanks sir!

      Reply
  • Adam Machanic
    October 21, 2014 10:51 am

    It’s impossible to guess when you make up terms like “instrumentation tables.”

    Reply
    • Brent
      October 21, 2014 10:52 am

      Adam – exactly, that’s the point. 😉

      Reply
  • Jason Boyer
    October 22, 2014 11:44 am

    I have used both and I have to say they are both needed. I prefer Mongo for its ease of use and raw speed, but there are time with an RDBMS is a better fit. I appreciate your willingness to raise Mongo above being the butt of jokes ;).

    Reply
  • Tobias Santos
    October 25, 2014 10:43 am

    Hello Brent,

    Good Day. Long time follower…first time poster.. Having worked with MongoDB since 1.6 and SQL Server since 6.5 in very large enterprise environments, yes, both technologies are buggy. Nothing new here.
    From a enterprise perspective, it is all about the management scale and the durability of your data system. SQL Server wins those two hands down. However, if you don’t believe me, MongoDB is web scale.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.

Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a Jaguar XKR-S, Porsche 944 Turbo, Porsche 356 Speedster replica, and a Ferrari 328 GTS.

profile for Brent Ozar on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

© 2021 Brent Ozar, all rights reserved. Privacy Policy

  • Home
  • My Favorite Topics
  • My Life Quest
  • About Me
  • My Recent Photos