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0 pointseli13y ago0 comments

Well, any time you'd rather have speed over completeness. Maybe you're aggregating tweets from the Twitter API and if the occasional one goes missing, it's not a big deal, or perhaps you can grab it on the next update. Maybe you're generating a real-time stats dashboard for your site and if one pageview gets lost every million, it's not a big deal.

Look, I agree that in most cases you probably want to do everything you can to make your data 100% complete. But failed writes should be really rare, and there are plenty of times I'd trade the rare missing write for cheaper/faster database servers.

0 comments

DanWaterworth13y ago

This wasn't the occasional write though, this was every write after 2GB. That should set off alarm bells somewhere.

benatkin13y ago

The way MongoDB is designed, this would be outside the scope of a driver. A storage library that's based on the ruby MongoDB driver could certainly do it, though. That's what the OP ideally should have been using. In fact MongoDB would be a good choice for his use case, if he would switch to a 64-bit VM and handle error conditions (heh).

twerquie13y ago

The problem with your code not caring if the odd record gets lost is that it probably also doesn't care if all records start getting lost.

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