I’m happy to say I’m back home after an excellent week at “That Conference” in Wisconsin Dells, and then a short trip to Chicago with my husband.

While I was at “That Conference” I hosted a small open spaces talk (basically a discussion group for those who aren’t familiar), about RavenDB. I met quite a few users of the technology, and it felt like everyone had the same story. It went like this:

When I first started using RavenDB I loved the .NET client. It was so easy to use. Then I put it in production and an indexing job consumed all the resources on my server. I was told I shouldn’t have made an index that way, but how was I supposed to know?

This story, and other similar “how could I have known that” moments seem to be a huge part of the RavenDB user experience. This causes some people to abandon the product, and others to be much less happy with it than they could be.

Personally, I think the real issue at hand is not a poor product. Instead, the issue is a young product that hasn’t had enough adoption to really have a set of best practices come up around it yet.

I can’t claim to be an expert in RavenDB – I’ve used it for about a year and a half, and after making quite a few mistakes with it, I can say that we are having success. That said, one thing I CAN do, is share my learning experiences so that the next person doesn’t have to go through the same thing. As such, I am starting a series of blog posts on places where I went wrong with RavenDB, and where others can avoid my mistakes.

• Raven Mistakes