If you are a fan of Gawker snark you may be familiar with my favorite advice column – ‘Thatz Not Okay.’  Recent headlines include “Thatz Not Okay: Can an Adult bring a Potato Gun to a Party?,”"Thatz Not Okay: Can you ask a person not to put their feet on an ATM” and the very recent “Thatz Not Okay: I like to lie, can I keep doing it?”

The column weighs the question sizing both the askee and the issue and usually comes down with “Thatz Not Okay!” but sometimes will give a “Thatz Okay!”

It’s entertaining and sticky in the best Nick Denton tradition . . . and its what popped into my head when I saw this post in response to a question about the role of the DBA in the NoSQL Linkedin group:

If my experience with MongoDB as a production database was any indicator, there is a strong need for experts to manage these sorts of systems. When we attempted to deploy MongoDB live at Liquor.com, our cluster fell over and lost data in the first few days. Our small engineering team did not have the expertise to handle it, and we quickly migrated the features we were using MongoDB for back to MySQL.

The poster, David Cloutman, the Director of Engineering at Liquor.com went on to say

As a DBA, you may find that your job in administering these types of schemaless systems is different than what you’re used to. You don’t have the ability to dictate the way data is stored in the same way, but in terms of systems, scaling, replication / sharding, there is certainly a need for experts who can create stable, high availability, clusters and troubleshoot them when things get ugly.

My very first reaction was “Thatz Not Okay!”  and posted:

-> David Cloutman: That’s NOT OKay!! If you read the Gawker snark column, that’s the first thing that popped into my head
Your database should not lose data and the basic operational blocks and tools should not be something that requires a huge level of expertise and specialization to add to the system as an exercise for your developers.

Here is the full discussion.

And here is the snarked up, Gawker-style version:

David, lets take this from the top:

1. You went to use a database . . . and it LOST YOUR DATA.  Thatz Not Okay! The entire purpose of a database is to STORE your data so you can get it back when you need it!

2. But hey, maybe you didn’t use it right or weren’t familiar with it?  Lots of people do things like cut their fingers off with chainsaws or run into things because the object was closer than it appeared in the mirror.  That’s why everything has those stickers all over it with warnings . . . surely there was something like that at play here, right? No!? You needed to immediately go and get experts just to use it correctly.  Giving people sharp tools without the instructions or access to the information to use them correctly . . . Thatz Not Okay!

3. But surely there was a reason you wanted to use a NoSQL system in the first place?  Schema flexibility, horizontal scale out . . . these are hard things with relational systems.  Isn’t it worth taking the extra steps to figure this out?  . . . Really you did not find it was worth the flexibility?  David writes, “we did indeed go back to MySQL. It has worked for us. I have no issues with using a persistent datastore that is non-relational. However, MongoDB simply did not offer the simplicity in administration we needed. We have a small engineering team composed entirely of developers, so system administration is a secondary skill for us.”

So you, David and your team had to forgo all the benefits of a NoSQL system because the management part of the DMBS was just plain missing.  Verdict: Thatz Not Okay!

I closed my first response to David with an observation that adding enterprise features of was a big trend in NoSQL – many of the open source projects are undertaking efforts to build out these features (sometimes as separate not open source components) and its what a lot of people look to MarkLogic for to run their applications on a proven, production ready enterprise system — that is fully ACID compliant!

Channeling the Gawker vibe one more time, I think I can be a bit stronger with that statement:

Dropping the MS part of the DBMS and placing that burden on your users . . . wait for it . . . one more time . . . Thatz Not Okay! Letting people get access to the game changing benefits of NoSQL with all the stable operations you expect from any database system?  MarkLogic, Thatz Okay!

Thatz Not Okay: Can my database lose my data? from MarkLogic.

At MarkLogic, partners are a key part of our success; working with them brings us closer to our customers, and allows us to deliver better solutions that uniquely address our customers’ technology challenges. This week we had the privilege of co-hosting a partners’ dinner on March 5 with our friends from Tableau Software at the Tower Club in McLean, VA. The event drew the enthusiastic participation of services partners who have worked with Tableau and MarkLogic.

Guests at the Tower Club heard about “The New Art of the Possible” from MarkLogic and Tableau Software

Todd Talkington, Technology Partner Manager from Tableau, and Kevin Shelly, VP of Public Sector for MarkLogic, gave an introduction to “the new art of the possible,” and Sara Mazer, Principal Engineer for MarkLogic, explained to the audience how Tableau and MarkLogic integrate to deliver unique capability in the Business Intelligence space.

Our guests got some new ideas on how the combined MarkLogic and Tableau solution can help deliver unique analytical capabilities to their customers, by allowing organizations to perform analytics against disparate data sets composed of any structure and any source. The power of easy to use self-service BI from Tableau – combined with the flexible aggregation of data by MarkLogic – delivers an unprecedented level of agility to Federal customers looking to leverage all their multi-structured and unstructured data.

Overall it was a fabulous evening, a great opportunity to catch up with our partners and share information about how Tableau and MarkLogic can help them deliver differentiated capabilities to their customers. We’re looking forward to holding more events like this in the future.

The New Art of the Possible: Tableau–MarkLogic Partners Dinner from MarkLogic.