Comment by anonwarnings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonwarnings | Hacker News Reader

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Not trolling, but for various reasons I don't want my employer linking these comments to my real account.

We spent a lot of time and money trying to get OrientDB working and we ran into so many problems that it was impossible for us to continue with it. It is buggy beyond belief, distributed mode is deeply flawed, transactions are not transactional, it's super easy to hang the database and the explain keyword straight up lies, the backup strategy is non-existent, the documentation incredibly poor and riddled with typos and outright mistakes. When we finally thought we'd got over these issues, we imported our data and the system ground to a halt, just weeks before a major product launch.

Luckily we were able to move to Postgres pretty quickly, but choosing OrientDB nearly sank the company, choosing it was an inaffordable mistake.

Also, look at this list of issues closed as "invalid/wontfix", it seems like you're a lot keener to close issues than to actually fix them - https://github.com/orientechnologies/orientdb/issues?utf8=%E...

I haven't (yet) experienced something likes this, but in my 5 month experience with OrientDB I do get the impression that the team prefers to add new features over fixing bugs. If you consider OrientDB is a database that's quite troublesome... A DB should be rock solid and all bugs should be dealt with swiftly.

Your angry comments remain anonymous. I'd like to know more about your experience and why it has been a so big failure, if this is really true.

Also generic comments like "backup strategy is not existent" when OrientDB supports backup/restore and export/import let me think you want just trolling this topic. Seriously, if you had a real bad experience on using OrientDB, please let us know by motivating all the statements above. Just drop an email to info at the company web site. Thanks.

I think you already know about this situation because the CTO was in contact with you about it. And it's not really anger, more disappointment.

About backups - OrientDB does not backup indexes, it recreates them on restore - but creating indexes is the most expensive operation! For us it meant an unacceptable level of downtime during a restore.

The impression I got when I was working with OrientDB is that you focus a lot on features, and OrientDB definitely has a lot of them. So anyone that does a naive point by point comparison with other products will naturally be blown away by OrientDB. But many of these features are not well thought out, or are broken in obvious or subtle ways - e.g. you support Lucene for full text search but it's unusable for anything but the most simple use case.

It takes a lot of development time before it becomes apparent just how broken the product is, and that is the problem - if it'd let us down in the first few weeks I wouldn't be writing this. Instead we encountered a constant stream of strange bugs and edge cases, and to be fair to you, you fixed a lot of these problems quickly, but we'd always find new ones, and it became a case of death by a thousand tiny cuts. Nevertheless, because of launch pressure we got into a position where we thought we had something that would suffice, but when we tested it with real world data we got constant lockups and OOM problems. When we realised that one of the most fundamental features - transaction support - was broken, we decided we had no choice but to change data stores and rethink our entire architecture, and to have to do that so late in the game was extremely painful and risky.

Ok, I understand who you are, but it's not fair saying the problems was on OrientDB product: we have a lot of clients running in production without such problems.

You used experimental parts like ETL (was still in development) and you guys were aware of this. Furthermore your roadmap was completely unreal, specially managing a new technology that nobody in your company was skilled on. If I was the CTO of your company I'd hire somebody skilled on OrientDB if this would become the foundation of my infrastructure. And you guys didn't model a Graph, but just kept the old model trying hard to let it working with OrientDB.

Last but not least, you never paid the renewal and in order to help you we provided support for FREE for 2 months. Sorry, but the main problem there wasn't the product, but the person that worked on this migration.

Maybe you lost your job because you wasn't able to do this migration, but please don't put mud on OrientDB.

We didn't use the ETL, we rolled our own, and I'm still with the company, so I think you have me confused with someone else. We hired someone who's an OrientDB expert to solve these problems because we assumed that the problem was a lack of skills on our part. Since they were also unable to fix the problems, and since we did run into very real bugs virtually every day, I'm confident that the problem is with the product and not ourselves. We did everything we could to make this work because OrientDB should have been an exact fit for our use case.

Ok, so at this point you wasn't a client and you never hire a real expert?

1) I don't know where did you find this expert. Plugin/driver authors couldn't be certified. Was this expert certified? And why didn't you ask for a certified guy to the Orient Technologies company?

2) Did you ever purchased any professional support from Orient Technologies company?

I think you're more interested in finding out who I am or who I work for and trying to discredit my claims than you are with addressing the issues I raised, so I'm going to decline to answer your questions. This was not an attack on you, although you've taken it as such, I was relating my experiences with your product.

@anonwarnings, are you comfortable speaking offline? Would be interested to hear more about your experience.

I don't think there's much more to say (also your email address isn't in your profile) - we had a very bad experience with OrientDB and we weren't doing anything out of the ordinary with it. We didn't even really use the graph features much beyond very simple traversals. The consultant that we hired to try and fix the mess was unable to do so, and he recently told me about 2 other companies that had a basically identical experience to us. The thing is just not ready for production, and for small startups making this kind of mistake can be fatal, that's the only reason I'm saying something.

@anonwarnings, added my email address to my profile. I'll leave it public through the weekend, if you're comfortable reaching out, let's chat.

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