29 ms·

MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

384 points by bnewton 9y ago

gremlinsinc 9y ago
Is it me..or does Mongo not seem as relevent and 'hip' as it once was... I mean I feel postgres is much more solid, and you can combine some of the aspects of document store via the json data types they added... of course I'm not really a DBA and don't have a lot of Mongo experience ... but personally I feel rdbms make more sense for growth/scaling..
- meritt 9y ago
  That's precisely why they IPO'd. Private investors needed an exit while they shift their money to Docker Inc for the next tech hype train. https://www.hntrends.com/2017/september.html?compare1=Mongodb&compare2=Docker&compare3=&compare4= https://www.hntrends.com/2017/september.html?compare1=Mongod...
- bpicolo 9y ago
  To be fair, Mongo is better than it's ever been. They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. That said, it's pretty hard to make sense of when you would want non-relational dbms these days, especially in an era where you can get 100core systems in AWS/GCP. Write-scaling is still a pretty obvious reason, though things like Citus might help here.
  - dsp1234 9y ago
    They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. With non-default settings[0]. The Jepsen tests passed with the "linearizable" read concern. The default read concern is "local", which "Provides no guarantee that the data has been written to a majority of the replica set members (i.e. may be rolled back)."[1] This is like having "READ UNCOMMITTED" be the default read level in a traditional database system. The Jepsen tests passed with the "majority" write concern. The default write concern is "1", which means only the "primary" in a replica set needs to acknowledge the write[2]. This does not guarantee safety in the face of network partitions. It's still not safe out of the box. [0] - https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 "With the v1 protocol, majority writes, and linearizable reads, MongoDB 3.4.1 (and the current development release, 3.5.1) pass all MongoDB Jepsen tests:" [1] - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/read-concern/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/read-concern/ [2] - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/write-concern/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/write-concern/
    - stingraycharles 9y ago
      These kind of default settings make sense, though. If you really care about lineair writes, you know how to configure it. Same goes for example for PostgreSQL [1], that uses Read Committed rather than Serializable transaction isolation by default because for the majority of the people, this is fine, and the performance tradeoffs are worth it. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/transaction-iso.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/transaction-iso.h...
      - bpicolo 9y ago
        Yeah, and you can turn off fsync in postgres if you want a blazing fast db that loses your data. :D
        threeseed 9y ago
        This meme isn't even funny anymore. It was a bug that was fixed many, many years ago and was only true if you didn't use any client libraries.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      Not sure if you know much about databases but those are standard defaults. Cassandra as well doesn't require a full quorum to acknowledge writes. It just relies on the closest node. Likewise for Oracle. http://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/2.0/cassandra/dml/dml_config_consistency_c.html http://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/2.0/cassandra...
  - growse 9y ago
    > That said, it's pretty hard to make sense of when you would want non-relational dbms these days. Write-scaling is still a pretty obvious reason, though things like Citus might help here. Personally, I find a non-relational database useful when my data model is non-relational.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      Sure. The most direct argument against that is that Postgresql jsonb is just non-relational data support in a first class relational DB, which is pretty great, so to an extend you get the best of both worlds, though I'm sure you can find a case where it's not quite optimal vs some nosql db. This talk is a pretty nifty perf overview: https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sessions/high-performance-json-postgresql-vs-mongodb https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sessions/high-performance-j... That said, if you know beforehand that horizontal scaling will be a crucial factor, probably postgres isn't the first choice. But with how fast CPUs are these days it's usually not important for a long time.
      - jsjohnst 9y ago
        > But with how fast CPUs are these days it's usually not important for a long time. That’s a very naive statement to make.
        bpicolo 9y ago
        Is it? Because there are a ton of companies out there running postgres, mysql and scaling workloads just fine.
        jsjohnst 9y ago
        I upvoted you because you’re technically right for many cases, but if you’d ever dealt with a database you couldn’t scale further (we were using multiple of the largest instances EC2 had at the time) and new data was flowing in faster than you could delete it and downtime wasn’t an option, you too would hate any predecessors who said “you can always scale higher” before things got so bad it was almost impossible to recover.
- _jordan 9y ago
  I sorta feel the same way - but then I think about the 800(?) employees they have and their combined skillset in database administration, internals, research, philosophy and I'm left feeling like there has got to be a very strong technical and business use case that I just don't see. Like I would imagine that if I were locked in a room with their Sr. product people and devs, they could easily convince most people of mongodb. I would pay money to see a debate style db-off between Postgres' core devs, and representatives from Mongodb.
- VintageCool 9y ago
  Mongo is no longer as "hip", but it is slowly breaking into the enterprise as people learn the right use cases for it.
  - lotyrin 9y ago
    And as it matures to meet more cases (e.g. new consensus, storage solutions).
  - takeda 9y ago
    I still have trouble to find proper use cases for MongoDB that a more solid database couldn't handle.
- rhizome 9y ago
  I had a phone screen with a company just a couple of months ago that ran on MongoDB and they were committed to it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gaius 9y ago
    Sounds like you dodged a bullet!
- da_chicken 9y ago
  RDBMS makes sense for most applications. Most applications store data that can be fit to the relational model. Most applications aren't big data or data mining OLAP. Most RDBMSs can do key-value stores very well now. Most applications also care more about consistency over availability, which is what RDBMSs do (CAP theorem). Many NoSQL data stores choose availability and partitioning and sacrifice consistency (i.e., "eventual consistency"). There's a lot of applications that you can't sacrifice consistency for. Electronic health records, financial records, student records, employee records, etc. You care that the data are accurate and up to date, and you want the system to error if it can't provide that. Wrong answers and "close enough" answers aren't good enough. Now, if you're running Reddit or Wikipedia or Facebook or HN... do you really care if a user doesn't get the absolute latest version of a document or comment? No, not really. If the content is hours old it's a problem, but it's not a big deal if it's a few minutes out of date. You care more that your users get a version of the document more than you care that they get the latest version of the document.
  - eternalban 9y ago
    > RDBMS makes sense for most applications. But "applications" are built by development teams. So: Does an "RDBMS makes sense for most applications"?
    - kornish 9y ago
      Could you point to a definition of "application" that has the word "team" in it?
      - eternalban 9y ago
        Why should I waste time on a non-sequitur?
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    You don't seem to know this, but no traditional RDBMSs actually provide CAP consistency, for that they would have to use at least two-phase commit or something, but they don't. So, they all are noCAP databases. Electronic health or financial records are way safer in a proper eventually consistent database, like orders of magnitude safer, but everyone just takes the risk with some insurance at best to cover the losses. EDIT: If you downvote, please explain why. You can't disagree with the truth.
- stuffedBelly 9y ago
  It's not hip anymore, but it's still relevant. A company might need to be hip to hype up their technology at the initial stage to gain audiences but eventually they need to settle on a mature business model that might not seem exciting but would let the company survive.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  Postgres is actually much less solid, it's a database from the different era and doesn't come close to any post-CAP database, even to the infamous Mongodb.
  - orf 9y ago
    yeah... no. Can you explain why being "from a different era" (and so having a hell of a lot more development time and battle testing) is a bad thing. While you're at it you could also elaborate on why Postgres is much less "solid" than a database that literally eats writes without any consensus as to if they are valid and/or actually written. After that you could explain why "post-cap" is a thing. Until you do, your comment is pretty useless and it sounds like you could do with a nice shot of consistent, well designed database right to the heart.
- gordon_freeman 9y ago
  whenever I hear people say such things as "Oh..this app won't work well with RDBMS and it definitely needs a Document style Db.", I recall that facebook from its beginning and still use MySQL (RDBMS) database. This proves that RDBMS is relentlessly scalable and can work with very complex apps.
  - ryanianian 9y ago
    and facebook has had to spend millions in making it work for their use-cases. it's not like facebook just enables the --scale flag for vanilla mysql and then walks away. not saying they'd be able to make vanilla mongo scale to their needs without serious investment either, but saying "facebook uses this so therefore it's good enough for me" discounts a lot of work that goes into making those solutions work for their needs/scale.
- mirekrusin 9y ago
  This fact has not dribbled down from programmers to higher management yet, it seems.
brootstrap 9y ago
mongo is web scale! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
nolok 9y ago
In a world where Giphy is valued by investors at 400M, I'm not sure if half that for mongodb is good or bad.
- khc 9y ago
  They raised 192M but their valuation is much higher.
- meritt 9y ago
  They sold 8,000,000 shares at $24 but that is only 16% [1] of shares outstanding. The stock is ~$30 as of now, which yields a total valuation of $1.47B [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917006396/a2233556zs-1a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917...
perseusprime11 9y ago
Twitter...Snapchat....MongoDB...Beware!
felipellrocha 9y ago
Does anyone use Mongo anymore? Edit: Honest to god question. I was surprised when I saw the headline, because I've never seen anyone use mongo in production, and never ran into any articles talking about using mongo.
- jasonmaydie 9y ago
  are you saying it has become ubiquitous?
- dajohnson89 9y ago
  yes?
- stusmall 9y ago
  Oh, hackernews
- 52804375092485 9y ago
  I can't think of a compelling reason to use Mongo over Cassandra except "we already use it and don't want to change".
  - enjo 9y ago
    It's a fair bit easier to setup than Cassandra and a document store is simply easier for most people to reason about than column-families. For something like your typical rails app, Mongo has some real nice properties. It makes it sticky. You start out with Mongo because you can just drop data in and off you go. You keep using it because Mongo, despite all of its drawbacks, is really plenty good enough for more than 80% of the stuff on the web.
- emilsedgh 9y ago
  What I'm mostly interested to see is the rate of new projects using mongo. Do they have growth at a rate that justifies their valuation? If that's the case, is HN living in its own bubble? Because if you read HN you'd think that nobody will use mongodb for a new project.
heliodor 9y ago
I don't understand why everyone is so happy when IPOs go up and make it sound like a good event. I see it as the founders needlessly missing out on 30% of money (in this case), which ends up going in the pockets of the Wall Street middle men that get first access to the stock offering.
- josephpmay 9y ago
  Well, the founders’ shares are usually locked up for months after the IPO, right? More like the VC investors and company missed out on some of their money (which is less than 30% for a 30% rise)
  - xapata 9y ago
    Depends on how the number of shares offered and the dilution was calculated.
  - tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
    Didn't Zuckerberg immediately issue a lot more shares and instantly sell them at the IPO?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mason55 9y ago
  There are other reasons you might want a pop as opposed to squeezing every possible cent out of the IPO - For better or worse, a pop is seen as a successful IPO. A lot of the market is about expectations and if you have an "unsuccessful" IPO you are going to get good press. - Underwriters are selling to the same institutional investors over and over. They're going to promise those investors that there will be a reward for getting in on this IPO. If an underwriter sells a bunch of IPOs that don't go anywhere they are going to have trouble continuing to underwrite
  - elgenie 9y ago
    Both of those are meaningless to a company when compared to having 30% more money to devote to their projects. Because of lockups, the IPO pop is irrelevant to employees and most insiders, whose proceeds are usually determined by the stock's value six months from IPO. The first point amounts to one good press cycle. You can get that other ways and the lasting value of a single cycle of fluffed up good press based on underwriters and their cronies making money on their shares is nil. The second is entirely the underwriter's problem. A company only IPOs once; there's no reason for them to take a hit to help the underwriter and friends make money for no reason. The underwriter takes a cut and a fee regardless.
shubhamjain 9y ago
MongoDB isn't usually seen favorably but everyone must admit that it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration. Think about it. Bringing a database to the market with a completely different paradigm, growing it to the enterprise-production-ready level, and creating a billion-dollar business around is no small deal. Yes, they did ride the NoSQL zeitgeist but they survived when others had no major success. Undeniably, they did have their fuck-ups in the start, but I think they have done a good job fixing them.
- enjo 9y ago
  It really is an interesting story. They aren't best in class in any of the metrics we think of as mattering. It's not the highest scale system out there. It's not the most durable. Or the most available. Hell it's not even particularly reliable (at least throughout its history). It is however..simple. Very simple. It's easy to reason about. It's easy to setup. For 90% of use cases it's very easy to administer. It turns out the market for that type of data store. Something you can apt-get install and just start dropping data into is pretty massive. I've used MongoDB on a few occasions. Usually thinking I'm just using it to bootstrap a project, but three years later it's still running because it's just good enough to keep me from moving on to something else.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Developer ergonomics are way more important than many features to get wide adoption. You can fix the other things with time. Worse is better.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      Except when you poison mindshare. For example, I used Mongo back in the early days. Was terrible. I will now never use it again. I don't care if it shoots lasers. It is dead to me. Obviously the happy developer count is way more than the hate it for life count, so I am the odd man out here. Perhaps many users never actually had many GB of data or had to deal with the data loss side of things?
Muuuchem 9y ago
I thought they were supposed to go closer to 1 BN
- partiallypro 9y ago
  The IPO was $192M, the worth of the company is slightly above $1B
jc_811 9y ago
->"MongoDB was the database that most software developers said they wanted to work with, according to StackOverflow's survey of 64,000 developers." Does this just seem like it can't be true? Does anyone know where or why this would be the case?
- cloverich 9y ago
  A lot of the bootcamp schools use mongo from what I remember. An interesting comparison would be what devs with 5+ years of experience prefer to use.
  - tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
    That's not "software developers", though. And how many people would that actually be, not most I'd think...
    - eric-hu 9y ago
      A friend of mine works in a commercial real estate consulting company. One of his former co-workers was non technical, but kept insisting they use Mongo for their projects. He believed it would automatically boost the performance of a system. I guess he thought of it like installing a turbocharger in a car. I have no idea what his sources were for this, but it signals Mongo's marketing power to me if a non developer would become so avid about it.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Curiosity? Redis and Postgres are still above it as the "most loved": https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-databases https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-mo...
- gangstead 9y ago
  Maybe they just surveyed bootcamp attendees.
- pier25 9y ago
huac 9y ago
$192M IPO means $192M of funds raised in the sale, at a valuation of $1.2B.
- heisenbit 9y ago
  Which is a little more than the amount of money they lost the last two years. Taking into account their 100M in the back this gives them roughly 3.5 years at the same loss level.
revmoo 9y ago
MongoDB and Red Bull are two of the best marketing companies on Earth
bfrog 9y ago
Mongo is a marketing company for a mediocre product, but no doubt they're damn good at marketing it.
- takeda 9y ago
  They're also f*ing annoying. One of their sales people was bugging me for 2-3 weeks sending e-mail nearly every day. He even subscribed me to their mailing lists without my permission.
semanticfact 9y ago
I hope Neo4j will achieve something similar. Relational does a lot very well but for certain use cases a graph is far superior.
notyourday 9y ago
This means the company absolutely positively mispriced the offering. The company could have successfully raised nearly 30% more money.
- kelnos 9y ago
  That's not how it works. When you're shopping around your IPO before going public, you need to get commitments from institutional investors to buy your stock at IPO at a particular price. Just because people will start buying at +30% shortly after IPO does not mean you can get investors to commit to a 30% higher IPO price beforehand.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    That's exactly how it works. What you are describing is the standard IB B.S. speech. It has been debunked multiple times, starting from the time of DLJ.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      Huh? I'm not saying it's reasonable/good or doesn't involve cronyism and "discounts" for "favored" investors, but what I described is actually how it works.
jartelt 9y ago
Per crunchbase they raised their last funding round on a pre-money valuation of $1.6 billion. Since the market cap now is less than that valuation, why is the coverage saying this is a big success? It seems to me like this is a down round of some sort. Does anyone know if I am missing something here? Or does this type of down round not really affect the employees common stock?
- tschellenbach 9y ago
  That really depends on the terms of their last investment round. As far as I know those haven't been disclosed. I would suspect that the investor in the last round is compensated with more shares, probably something similar to if he had invested at a 1.1 billion instead of 1.6 billion valuation. Maybe not though. Depends on the terms.
ww520 9y ago
Technology aside, how's their financial status now that they have IPO'ed? Does it seem like a good investment?
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  heisenbit above notes that this raises enough money so that the company can last 3.5 years at their current burn rate.
- sjg007 9y ago
  I would look at year over year growth. How you define growth will decide the riskiness for you.
mi100hael 9y ago
> "Most applications today run on a database technology that was introduced in the 1970s," Ittycheria said. "In the '70s, I was using a rotary phone to have a phone conversation. So people are looking for a modern, scalable and flexible platform." It's like a weird version of the Turing test where you have to decide whether someone's speaking seriously or in jest when they talk about NoSQL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
- mrfusion 9y ago
  Most vehicles are rolling around on technology that was invented 10000 years ago. (Is that the same idea?)
  - semanticfact 9y ago
    That's interesting.
    - blibble 9y ago
      was it not round?
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        I guess it didn’t have a hollow core...
      - tdhz77 9y ago
        Firestone recalled those tires in 1999.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      Well, the SGDBs of the 70's were nothing like the ones around today.
- blauditore 9y ago
  I know there's quite some aversion to NoSQL around here, and generally I don't care much as I'm seldomly dealing directly with databases. But recently, I've been exposed to a fairly big and complex SQL one with several references between entities and lots, lots of X_has_Y tables. This makes me think that with growing complexity (which seems to be a general trend), NoSQL databases seem more practical at some point, or at least something less rigid than classic relational ones. I'm not saying SQL is obsolete, but it seems like its domain of usefulness is shrinking.
RHSman2 9y ago
Lets just hope the db that is used to store the data on said shares isn't MongoDB ;)
eltoozero 9y ago
Obligatory: MongoDB is web scale.[0] [0]: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs
bastijn 9y ago
After being introduced to the MongoDB stale read issue in 2015 [1] we abandoned MongoDB and never looked back. Anyone knows if this is resolved in the latest versions? [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads
- travisp 9y ago
  It got significantly better in 3.4 -- this analysis claims that the issues were finally resolved in 3.4 (although they were in the RC) https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3
  - bastijn 9y ago
    Thanks. Seems they did some good work indeed. Though it takes time before they get back the trust they lost over this.
    - takeda 9y ago
      Still, the settings that let them pass these tests are not defaults. And the reason for them being non-defaults is that it will drastically reduce performance. Edit: Also looks like Kyle saved for the next time testing of server crashes and restarts which is another difficult problem to handle when performance is important.
trumpownsyou420 9y ago
it's almost like this whole argument boils down to use case or something. ya fuggin cuckz.
z3t4 9y ago
Whats MongoDB's business model !? Open source, and separate "enterprise" closed source version !? Are contributors OK with this or are most contributors in-house ? It seems Nginx et.al are also using this business model ... I'm thinking about starting my own open source business.
- john_moscow 9y ago
  Open-source and an army of sales people that will convince big company decision-makers who don't understand what open-source is to go for the hosted solution.
- dplgk 9y ago
  Support contracts, setup, etc.
- gaius 9y ago
  Bait and switch They promise that it's so easy to use you don't need a DBA, you don't need any ops staff to run it, etc, just develop and go! Then once you're in too deep, they get you...
pier25 9y ago
This article is still relevant: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/ http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never... The main point is: most of your data is most likely relational and not document based. Use the DB that fits your data model, and not the data model that fits your DB.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  Even for document data, Postgres is quite competitive https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sites/default/files/slides/High%20Performance%20JSON%20-%20PostgreSQL%20vs.%20MongoDB%20-%20FileId%20-%20115573.pdf https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sites/default/files/slides/...
odammit 9y ago
I think the share price will be eventually consistent.
- s3nnyy 9y ago
  Is this a pun? For puns I go to Reddit, for substance to HN.
  - odammit 9y ago
    My sincerest apologies. I hope I didn’t ruin your entire week.
dna_polymerase 9y ago
MongoDB worth > $1B?! Ladies and Gentlemen, we're back in 2000 again. Brace yourselves for the bubble bursting!
danbmil99 9y ago
ach, the interminable hatred of mongodb is an anthropological artifact worthy of study. It's the only truly working example of a horizontally scalable arbitrary document storage and retrieval system with indexing on any element. It is a much more general tool then an RDBS, and should never be used when an RDBS would do the job. However, it's really good at collecting searchable, arbitrary schemaless data in real time. The newest versions do what they're supposed to do rather well, it's a tool like any other tool. That said, the company is guilty of overhyping for sure, and I wouldn't invest in the stock on a rational basis.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  > should never be used when an RDBS would do the job The hate comes exactly from that. The "hipster" just use it for everything. Try reading some "modern" webdev tutorial without seeing it used wrongly.
- jmakeig 9y ago
  Only? Many of the early MongoDB employees came from MarkLogic. Several have returned too. (Full disclosure: PM at MarkLogic)
  - danbmil99 9y ago
    Well you guys must have a pretty lame marketing department because I've been using noSql for the better part of a decade and I've never heard of you. A quick look at your web page tells me why. You have no open source or free version that I can download and kick the tires of.
john_moscow 9y ago
So instructions on making a successful company in 2017: 1. Spot a non-trivial expense type applicable to most Fortune 500 companies. 2. Make a startup offering the same thing under the cost. 3. Use your network to get sales people that personally know exec-level people from Fortune 500 and will pitch the product to them. 4. Get them to sign up. Of course they'll do, you're offering it under cost at the investors' expense. 5. Show impressive revenue and customer base growth and forget the word "profitability". 6. Make an IPO and cash in before the public realizes that your might have been selling dollars for ninety cents. Who's left holding the bag? Average Joe, who's pension fund ended up investing in a promising technology company showing exemplary revenue growth over an extended time period...
- ragnarok451 9y ago
  To be fair, Average Joe's pension fund was probably invested in one of the VCs that who cashed out at the IPO too. So Average Joe likely still benefits at the end of the day.
xchaotic 9y ago
Hmm, I work for a competing nosql company and the good news about the IPO is: It should raise the visibility of all database products, not just Mongo. The second part is that IPO for a database company is viable in this climate. Some of the early workers have been waiting for a long time for the IPO. I bet this spawns a new group of seed investors.
- swyx 9y ago
  yes MDB's success is fantastic news for innovation in the space as a whole. I hope your company does well too.
ssutch3 9y ago
In real-live-production workloads I've had nothing but pain with MongoDB. They see more like a marketing and sales team piggybacking on a strange and immature database technology.
jijji 9y ago
ride that gravy train till there is no more gravy
manigandham 9y ago
As usual, the confusion and religious comments are numerous. There is no such thing as "nosql". There are different types of databases, with traditional relational being useful for 95% of scenarios (especially on increasingly fast servers with decent replication features) while the rest of the time something more specific is needed. SQL is just an interface, obviously common to relational databases but can be applied to any datastore. Spark/Drill/Presto/Dremio/etc can give you SQL over any data, even just files in a folder somewhere, so let's clear up this notion between actual database technology and the access path. Document stores are definitely useful. MongoDB is one of the better ones today although it had a rocky start. RethinkDB was an interesting experiment but never matured, RavenDB is a solid contender, Couchbase has proven itself, Riak might stick around, and there are dozens of others. There is a place for everything and MongoDB is being used by plenty of companies to great extent. It might not always be the right choice but when it is, it works incredibly well. Good luck to the team, I'm glad to see the success in both the product and the company.
- philliphaydon 9y ago
  Marten > RavenDB!
  - manigandham 9y ago
    In some cases, but ravendb 4.0 is natively clustered and has more querying capabilities and performance when using all of the document store functionality.
- lstyls 9y ago
  > There is no such thing as nosql This is not at all correct. SQL has well defined semantics that are standardized around the relational model and ACID guarantees. A nosql datastore is one that intentionally makes tradeoffs that force it to deviate from that model. The name makes sense if you understand that SQL was the first broadly adopted language that targeted the relational model. I'm not very familiar with the systems you mention other than Presto. But if they do not provide relational guarantees then even if they have SQL-like syntax the semantics are sufficiently different for them to not be implementing a true SQL. Hence, nosql.
KB 9y ago
Having gone through a few acquisitions where MongoDB was used, I would never recommend using it from a legal/compliance perspective. You either have to pay for a very expensive commercial license OR adhere to their AGPL license (which is very difficult). https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/ https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/GNU-AGPL-3.0.txt https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/GNU-AGPL-3.0.tx...
- gaadd33 9y ago
  Why do you need a commercial license or have to do anything special for AGPL compliance if you aren't modifying the codebase and using the binaries from Mongo's website/repo? It looks like all of the drivers you would use to connect to it are Apache 2.0 licensed so that wouldn't be a reason.
mathattack 9y ago
Interesting valuation. 8x revenue is a success for SaaS companies. They were initially priced at $20/share, which would imply ~9.5x revenue. At $32/share they're at ~16x revenue. Very steep. They also fail the VC "rule of 40" where SaaS companies should have growth plus margins equal to 40%. (50% growth and negative 10% margins, or 10% growth and 30% margins) They seem to be at 50% growth, but minus 40% margins. Somehow they pulled it off. Great for them!
- dx034 9y ago
  For non-tech people, MongoDB often represents areas such as "big data". I work with a lot of people that have very little tech knowledge and the name comes up frequently to demonstrate that you're hip. It's the same that being on AWS convinces investors because running your own servers is so yesterday. Only Hadoop probably has an even bigger name. That's what everyone connects with machine learning and AI, so every big company needs a Hadoop cluster.
karmapolic 9y ago
The oracle of the NoSql world.
bad_user 9y ago
The irony of the situation is that MongoDB is now pretty good at horizontal scalability, probably because of all the big companies that were fooled into using it, which then had to fix it :-) Seeing the comments in this thread, it's interesting how it gets compared with PostgreSQL. People are missing the point — NoSQL only happened because of horizontal scalability requirements, being the number one reason for why people want NoSQL. Just because PostgreSQL can now store and interrogate JSON, that doesn't mean that PostgreSQL can scale horizontally. In fact PostgreSQL sucks at horizontal scaling, historically its replication story has been worse than MySQL actually. And might not have big data, but you might want redundancy and scenarios with pretty tight SLAs are not uncommon at all.
jamaicahest 9y ago
>Twenty-one percent of respondents told industry site StackOverflow that MongoDB was the most popular database, second only to versions from the dominant technology, SQL, which traces its roots back to legacy technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are legacy technology companies? What kind of hipster journalist wrote this article?
gerbilly 9y ago
Maybe machines are too fast today. Back in the 70s, even departmental computers were slow. This might have forced better engineering choices onto the product designers. The difference between and O( n log n) algorithm and an O(n^2) one could have made the difference between a decent product and a totally unusable one. Nowadays, toy examples can seem to work fine even when the products have really terrible implementations.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
goldfishcaura 9y ago
Who would have though given that at some point this "Don't use MongoDB" seemed to have taken over HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081

384 points by bnewton 9y ago

Is it me..or does Mongo not seem as relevent and 'hip' as it once was... I mean I feel postgres is much more solid, and you can combine some of the aspects of document store via the json data types they added... of course I'm not really a DBA and don't have a lot of Mongo experience ... but personally I feel rdbms make more sense for growth/scaling..

meritt 9y ago
That's precisely why they IPO'd. Private investors needed an exit while they shift their money to Docker Inc for the next tech hype train. https://www.hntrends.com/2017/september.html?compare1=Mongodb&compare2=Docker&compare3=&compare4= https://www.hntrends.com/2017/september.html?compare1=Mongod...
bpicolo 9y ago
To be fair, Mongo is better than it's ever been. They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. That said, it's pretty hard to make sense of when you would want non-relational dbms these days, especially in an era where you can get 100core systems in AWS/GCP. Write-scaling is still a pretty obvious reason, though things like Citus might help here.
- dsp1234 9y ago
  They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. With non-default settings[0]. The Jepsen tests passed with the "linearizable" read concern. The default read concern is "local", which "Provides no guarantee that the data has been written to a majority of the replica set members (i.e. may be rolled back)."[1] This is like having "READ UNCOMMITTED" be the default read level in a traditional database system. The Jepsen tests passed with the "majority" write concern. The default write concern is "1", which means only the "primary" in a replica set needs to acknowledge the write[2]. This does not guarantee safety in the face of network partitions. It's still not safe out of the box. [0] - https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 "With the v1 protocol, majority writes, and linearizable reads, MongoDB 3.4.1 (and the current development release, 3.5.1) pass all MongoDB Jepsen tests:" [1] - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/read-concern/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/read-concern/ [2] - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/write-concern/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/write-concern/
  - stingraycharles 9y ago
    These kind of default settings make sense, though. If you really care about lineair writes, you know how to configure it. Same goes for example for PostgreSQL [1], that uses Read Committed rather than Serializable transaction isolation by default because for the majority of the people, this is fine, and the performance tradeoffs are worth it. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/transaction-iso.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/transaction-iso.h...
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      Yeah, and you can turn off fsync in postgres if you want a blazing fast db that loses your data. :D
      - threeseed 9y ago
        This meme isn't even funny anymore. It was a bug that was fixed many, many years ago and was only true if you didn't use any client libraries.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Not sure if you know much about databases but those are standard defaults. Cassandra as well doesn't require a full quorum to acknowledge writes. It just relies on the closest node. Likewise for Oracle. http://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/2.0/cassandra/dml/dml_config_consistency_c.html http://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/2.0/cassandra...
- growse 9y ago
  > That said, it's pretty hard to make sense of when you would want non-relational dbms these days. Write-scaling is still a pretty obvious reason, though things like Citus might help here. Personally, I find a non-relational database useful when my data model is non-relational.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Sure. The most direct argument against that is that Postgresql jsonb is just non-relational data support in a first class relational DB, which is pretty great, so to an extend you get the best of both worlds, though I'm sure you can find a case where it's not quite optimal vs some nosql db. This talk is a pretty nifty perf overview: https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sessions/high-performance-json-postgresql-vs-mongodb https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sessions/high-performance-j... That said, if you know beforehand that horizontal scaling will be a crucial factor, probably postgres isn't the first choice. But with how fast CPUs are these days it's usually not important for a long time.
    - jsjohnst 9y ago
      > But with how fast CPUs are these days it's usually not important for a long time. That’s a very naive statement to make.
      - bpicolo 9y ago
        Is it? Because there are a ton of companies out there running postgres, mysql and scaling workloads just fine.
        jsjohnst 9y ago
        I upvoted you because you’re technically right for many cases, but if you’d ever dealt with a database you couldn’t scale further (we were using multiple of the largest instances EC2 had at the time) and new data was flowing in faster than you could delete it and downtime wasn’t an option, you too would hate any predecessors who said “you can always scale higher” before things got so bad it was almost impossible to recover.
_jordan 9y ago
I sorta feel the same way - but then I think about the 800(?) employees they have and their combined skillset in database administration, internals, research, philosophy and I'm left feeling like there has got to be a very strong technical and business use case that I just don't see. Like I would imagine that if I were locked in a room with their Sr. product people and devs, they could easily convince most people of mongodb. I would pay money to see a debate style db-off between Postgres' core devs, and representatives from Mongodb.
VintageCool 9y ago
Mongo is no longer as "hip", but it is slowly breaking into the enterprise as people learn the right use cases for it.
- lotyrin 9y ago
  And as it matures to meet more cases (e.g. new consensus, storage solutions).
- takeda 9y ago
  I still have trouble to find proper use cases for MongoDB that a more solid database couldn't handle.
rhizome 9y ago
I had a phone screen with a company just a couple of months ago that ran on MongoDB and they were committed to it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gaius 9y ago
  Sounds like you dodged a bullet!
da_chicken 9y ago
RDBMS makes sense for most applications. Most applications store data that can be fit to the relational model. Most applications aren't big data or data mining OLAP. Most RDBMSs can do key-value stores very well now. Most applications also care more about consistency over availability, which is what RDBMSs do (CAP theorem). Many NoSQL data stores choose availability and partitioning and sacrifice consistency (i.e., "eventual consistency"). There's a lot of applications that you can't sacrifice consistency for. Electronic health records, financial records, student records, employee records, etc. You care that the data are accurate and up to date, and you want the system to error if it can't provide that. Wrong answers and "close enough" answers aren't good enough. Now, if you're running Reddit or Wikipedia or Facebook or HN... do you really care if a user doesn't get the absolute latest version of a document or comment? No, not really. If the content is hours old it's a problem, but it's not a big deal if it's a few minutes out of date. You care more that your users get a version of the document more than you care that they get the latest version of the document.
- eternalban 9y ago
  > RDBMS makes sense for most applications. But "applications" are built by development teams. So: Does an "RDBMS makes sense for most applications"?
  - kornish 9y ago
    Could you point to a definition of "application" that has the word "team" in it?
    - eternalban 9y ago
      Why should I waste time on a non-sequitur?
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  You don't seem to know this, but no traditional RDBMSs actually provide CAP consistency, for that they would have to use at least two-phase commit or something, but they don't. So, they all are noCAP databases. Electronic health or financial records are way safer in a proper eventually consistent database, like orders of magnitude safer, but everyone just takes the risk with some insurance at best to cover the losses. EDIT: If you downvote, please explain why. You can't disagree with the truth.
stuffedBelly 9y ago
It's not hip anymore, but it's still relevant. A company might need to be hip to hype up their technology at the initial stage to gain audiences but eventually they need to settle on a mature business model that might not seem exciting but would let the company survive.
zzzcpan 9y ago
Postgres is actually much less solid, it's a database from the different era and doesn't come close to any post-CAP database, even to the infamous Mongodb.
- orf 9y ago
  yeah... no. Can you explain why being "from a different era" (and so having a hell of a lot more development time and battle testing) is a bad thing. While you're at it you could also elaborate on why Postgres is much less "solid" than a database that literally eats writes without any consensus as to if they are valid and/or actually written. After that you could explain why "post-cap" is a thing. Until you do, your comment is pretty useless and it sounds like you could do with a nice shot of consistent, well designed database right to the heart.
gordon_freeman 9y ago
whenever I hear people say such things as "Oh..this app won't work well with RDBMS and it definitely needs a Document style Db.", I recall that facebook from its beginning and still use MySQL (RDBMS) database. This proves that RDBMS is relentlessly scalable and can work with very complex apps.
- ryanianian 9y ago
  and facebook has had to spend millions in making it work for their use-cases. it's not like facebook just enables the --scale flag for vanilla mysql and then walks away. not saying they'd be able to make vanilla mongo scale to their needs without serious investment either, but saying "facebook uses this so therefore it's good enough for me" discounts a lot of work that goes into making those solutions work for their needs/scale.
mirekrusin 9y ago
This fact has not dribbled down from programmers to higher management yet, it seems.

brootstrap 9y ago

mongo is web scale! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

nolok 9y ago

In a world where Giphy is valued by investors at 400M, I'm not sure if half that for mongodb is good or bad.

khc 9y ago
They raised 192M but their valuation is much higher.
meritt 9y ago
They sold 8,000,000 shares at $24 but that is only 16% [1] of shares outstanding. The stock is ~$30 as of now, which yields a total valuation of $1.47B [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917006396/a2233556zs-1a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917...

perseusprime11 9y ago

Twitter...Snapchat....MongoDB...Beware!

felipellrocha 9y ago

Does anyone use Mongo anymore? Edit: Honest to god question. I was surprised when I saw the headline, because I've never seen anyone use mongo in production, and never ran into any articles talking about using mongo.

jasonmaydie 9y ago
are you saying it has become ubiquitous?
dajohnson89 9y ago
yes?
stusmall 9y ago
Oh, hackernews
52804375092485 9y ago
I can't think of a compelling reason to use Mongo over Cassandra except "we already use it and don't want to change".
- enjo 9y ago
  It's a fair bit easier to setup than Cassandra and a document store is simply easier for most people to reason about than column-families. For something like your typical rails app, Mongo has some real nice properties. It makes it sticky. You start out with Mongo because you can just drop data in and off you go. You keep using it because Mongo, despite all of its drawbacks, is really plenty good enough for more than 80% of the stuff on the web.
emilsedgh 9y ago
What I'm mostly interested to see is the rate of new projects using mongo. Do they have growth at a rate that justifies their valuation? If that's the case, is HN living in its own bubble? Because if you read HN you'd think that nobody will use mongodb for a new project.

heliodor 9y ago

I don't understand why everyone is so happy when IPOs go up and make it sound like a good event. I see it as the founders needlessly missing out on 30% of money (in this case), which ends up going in the pockets of the Wall Street middle men that get first access to the stock offering.

josephpmay 9y ago
Well, the founders’ shares are usually locked up for months after the IPO, right? More like the VC investors and company missed out on some of their money (which is less than 30% for a 30% rise)
- xapata 9y ago
  Depends on how the number of shares offered and the dilution was calculated.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
  Didn't Zuckerberg immediately issue a lot more shares and instantly sell them at the IPO?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mason55 9y ago
There are other reasons you might want a pop as opposed to squeezing every possible cent out of the IPO - For better or worse, a pop is seen as a successful IPO. A lot of the market is about expectations and if you have an "unsuccessful" IPO you are going to get good press. - Underwriters are selling to the same institutional investors over and over. They're going to promise those investors that there will be a reward for getting in on this IPO. If an underwriter sells a bunch of IPOs that don't go anywhere they are going to have trouble continuing to underwrite
- elgenie 9y ago
  Both of those are meaningless to a company when compared to having 30% more money to devote to their projects. Because of lockups, the IPO pop is irrelevant to employees and most insiders, whose proceeds are usually determined by the stock's value six months from IPO. The first point amounts to one good press cycle. You can get that other ways and the lasting value of a single cycle of fluffed up good press based on underwriters and their cronies making money on their shares is nil. The second is entirely the underwriter's problem. A company only IPOs once; there's no reason for them to take a hit to help the underwriter and friends make money for no reason. The underwriter takes a cut and a fee regardless.

shubhamjain 9y ago

MongoDB isn't usually seen favorably but everyone must admit that it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration. Think about it. Bringing a database to the market with a completely different paradigm, growing it to the enterprise-production-ready level, and creating a billion-dollar business around is no small deal. Yes, they did ride the NoSQL zeitgeist but they survived when others had no major success. Undeniably, they did have their fuck-ups in the start, but I think they have done a good job fixing them.

enjo 9y ago
It really is an interesting story. They aren't best in class in any of the metrics we think of as mattering. It's not the highest scale system out there. It's not the most durable. Or the most available. Hell it's not even particularly reliable (at least throughout its history). It is however..simple. Very simple. It's easy to reason about. It's easy to setup. For 90% of use cases it's very easy to administer. It turns out the market for that type of data store. Something you can apt-get install and just start dropping data into is pretty massive. I've used MongoDB on a few occasions. Usually thinking I'm just using it to bootstrap a project, but three years later it's still running because it's just good enough to keep me from moving on to something else.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Developer ergonomics are way more important than many features to get wide adoption. You can fix the other things with time. Worse is better.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    Except when you poison mindshare. For example, I used Mongo back in the early days. Was terrible. I will now never use it again. I don't care if it shoots lasers. It is dead to me. Obviously the happy developer count is way more than the hate it for life count, so I am the odd man out here. Perhaps many users never actually had many GB of data or had to deal with the data loss side of things?

Muuuchem 9y ago

I thought they were supposed to go closer to 1 BN

partiallypro 9y ago
The IPO was $192M, the worth of the company is slightly above $1B

jc_811 9y ago

->"MongoDB was the database that most software developers said they wanted to work with, according to StackOverflow's survey of 64,000 developers." Does this just seem like it can't be true? Does anyone know where or why this would be the case?

cloverich 9y ago
A lot of the bootcamp schools use mongo from what I remember. An interesting comparison would be what devs with 5+ years of experience prefer to use.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
  That's not "software developers", though. And how many people would that actually be, not most I'd think...
  - eric-hu 9y ago
    A friend of mine works in a commercial real estate consulting company. One of his former co-workers was non technical, but kept insisting they use Mongo for their projects. He believed it would automatically boost the performance of a system. I guess he thought of it like installing a turbocharger in a car. I have no idea what his sources were for this, but it signals Mongo's marketing power to me if a non developer would become so avid about it.
icebraining 9y ago
Curiosity? Redis and Postgres are still above it as the "most loved": https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-databases https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-mo...
gangstead 9y ago
Maybe they just surveyed bootcamp attendees.
pier25 9y ago

huac 9y ago

$192M IPO means $192M of funds raised in the sale, at a valuation of $1.2B.

heisenbit 9y ago
Which is a little more than the amount of money they lost the last two years. Taking into account their 100M in the back this gives them roughly 3.5 years at the same loss level.

revmoo 9y ago

MongoDB and Red Bull are two of the best marketing companies on Earth

bfrog 9y ago

Mongo is a marketing company for a mediocre product, but no doubt they're damn good at marketing it.

takeda 9y ago
They're also f*ing annoying. One of their sales people was bugging me for 2-3 weeks sending e-mail nearly every day. He even subscribed me to their mailing lists without my permission.

semanticfact 9y ago

I hope Neo4j will achieve something similar. Relational does a lot very well but for certain use cases a graph is far superior.

notyourday 9y ago

This means the company absolutely positively mispriced the offering. The company could have successfully raised nearly 30% more money.

kelnos 9y ago
That's not how it works. When you're shopping around your IPO before going public, you need to get commitments from institutional investors to buy your stock at IPO at a particular price. Just because people will start buying at +30% shortly after IPO does not mean you can get investors to commit to a 30% higher IPO price beforehand.
- notyourday 9y ago
  That's exactly how it works. What you are describing is the standard IB B.S. speech. It has been debunked multiple times, starting from the time of DLJ.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Huh? I'm not saying it's reasonable/good or doesn't involve cronyism and "discounts" for "favored" investors, but what I described is actually how it works.

jartelt 9y ago

Per crunchbase they raised their last funding round on a pre-money valuation of $1.6 billion. Since the market cap now is less than that valuation, why is the coverage saying this is a big success? It seems to me like this is a down round of some sort. Does anyone know if I am missing something here? Or does this type of down round not really affect the employees common stock?

tschellenbach 9y ago
That really depends on the terms of their last investment round. As far as I know those haven't been disclosed. I would suspect that the investor in the last round is compensated with more shares, probably something similar to if he had invested at a 1.1 billion instead of 1.6 billion valuation. Maybe not though. Depends on the terms.

ww520 9y ago

Technology aside, how's their financial status now that they have IPO'ed? Does it seem like a good investment?

stevenwoo 9y ago
heisenbit above notes that this raises enough money so that the company can last 3.5 years at their current burn rate.
sjg007 9y ago
I would look at year over year growth. How you define growth will decide the riskiness for you.

mi100hael 9y ago

> "Most applications today run on a database technology that was introduced in the 1970s," Ittycheria said. "In the '70s, I was using a rotary phone to have a phone conversation. So people are looking for a modern, scalable and flexible platform." It's like a weird version of the Turing test where you have to decide whether someone's speaking seriously or in jest when they talk about NoSQL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

mrfusion 9y ago
Most vehicles are rolling around on technology that was invented 10000 years ago. (Is that the same idea?)
- semanticfact 9y ago
  That's interesting.
  - blibble 9y ago
    was it not round?
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      I guess it didn’t have a hollow core...
    - tdhz77 9y ago
      Firestone recalled those tires in 1999.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Well, the SGDBs of the 70's were nothing like the ones around today.
blauditore 9y ago
I know there's quite some aversion to NoSQL around here, and generally I don't care much as I'm seldomly dealing directly with databases. But recently, I've been exposed to a fairly big and complex SQL one with several references between entities and lots, lots of X_has_Y tables. This makes me think that with growing complexity (which seems to be a general trend), NoSQL databases seem more practical at some point, or at least something less rigid than classic relational ones. I'm not saying SQL is obsolete, but it seems like its domain of usefulness is shrinking.

RHSman2 9y ago

Lets just hope the db that is used to store the data on said shares isn't MongoDB ;)

eltoozero 9y ago

Obligatory: MongoDB is web scale.[0] [0]: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs

bastijn 9y ago

After being introduced to the MongoDB stale read issue in 2015 [1] we abandoned MongoDB and never looked back. Anyone knows if this is resolved in the latest versions? [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads

travisp 9y ago
It got significantly better in 3.4 -- this analysis claims that the issues were finally resolved in 3.4 (although they were in the RC) https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3
- bastijn 9y ago
  Thanks. Seems they did some good work indeed. Though it takes time before they get back the trust they lost over this.
  - takeda 9y ago
    Still, the settings that let them pass these tests are not defaults. And the reason for them being non-defaults is that it will drastically reduce performance. Edit: Also looks like Kyle saved for the next time testing of server crashes and restarts which is another difficult problem to handle when performance is important.

trumpownsyou420 9y ago

it's almost like this whole argument boils down to use case or something. ya fuggin cuckz.

z3t4 9y ago

Whats MongoDB's business model !? Open source, and separate "enterprise" closed source version !? Are contributors OK with this or are most contributors in-house ? It seems Nginx et.al are also using this business model ... I'm thinking about starting my own open source business.

john_moscow 9y ago
Open-source and an army of sales people that will convince big company decision-makers who don't understand what open-source is to go for the hosted solution.
dplgk 9y ago
Support contracts, setup, etc.
gaius 9y ago
Bait and switch They promise that it's so easy to use you don't need a DBA, you don't need any ops staff to run it, etc, just develop and go! Then once you're in too deep, they get you...

pier25 9y ago

This article is still relevant: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/ http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never... The main point is: most of your data is most likely relational and not document based. Use the DB that fits your data model, and not the data model that fits your DB.

olegkikin 9y ago
Even for document data, Postgres is quite competitive https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sites/default/files/slides/High%20Performance%20JSON%20-%20PostgreSQL%20vs.%20MongoDB%20-%20FileId%20-%20115573.pdf https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sites/default/files/slides/...

odammit 9y ago

I think the share price will be eventually consistent.

s3nnyy 9y ago
Is this a pun? For puns I go to Reddit, for substance to HN.
- odammit 9y ago
  My sincerest apologies. I hope I didn’t ruin your entire week.

dna_polymerase 9y ago

MongoDB worth > $1B?! Ladies and Gentlemen, we're back in 2000 again. Brace yourselves for the bubble bursting!

danbmil99 9y ago

ach, the interminable hatred of mongodb is an anthropological artifact worthy of study. It's the only truly working example of a horizontally scalable arbitrary document storage and retrieval system with indexing on any element. It is a much more general tool then an RDBS, and should never be used when an RDBS would do the job. However, it's really good at collecting searchable, arbitrary schemaless data in real time. The newest versions do what they're supposed to do rather well, it's a tool like any other tool. That said, the company is guilty of overhyping for sure, and I wouldn't invest in the stock on a rational basis.

Double_a_92 9y ago
> should never be used when an RDBS would do the job The hate comes exactly from that. The "hipster" just use it for everything. Try reading some "modern" webdev tutorial without seeing it used wrongly.
jmakeig 9y ago
Only? Many of the early MongoDB employees came from MarkLogic. Several have returned too. (Full disclosure: PM at MarkLogic)
- danbmil99 9y ago
  Well you guys must have a pretty lame marketing department because I've been using noSql for the better part of a decade and I've never heard of you. A quick look at your web page tells me why. You have no open source or free version that I can download and kick the tires of.

john_moscow 9y ago

So instructions on making a successful company in 2017: 1. Spot a non-trivial expense type applicable to most Fortune 500 companies. 2. Make a startup offering the same thing under the cost. 3. Use your network to get sales people that personally know exec-level people from Fortune 500 and will pitch the product to them. 4. Get them to sign up. Of course they'll do, you're offering it under cost at the investors' expense. 5. Show impressive revenue and customer base growth and forget the word "profitability". 6. Make an IPO and cash in before the public realizes that your might have been selling dollars for ninety cents. Who's left holding the bag? Average Joe, who's pension fund ended up investing in a promising technology company showing exemplary revenue growth over an extended time period...

ragnarok451 9y ago
To be fair, Average Joe's pension fund was probably invested in one of the VCs that who cashed out at the IPO too. So Average Joe likely still benefits at the end of the day.

xchaotic 9y ago

Hmm, I work for a competing nosql company and the good news about the IPO is: It should raise the visibility of all database products, not just Mongo. The second part is that IPO for a database company is viable in this climate. Some of the early workers have been waiting for a long time for the IPO. I bet this spawns a new group of seed investors.

swyx 9y ago
yes MDB's success is fantastic news for innovation in the space as a whole. I hope your company does well too.

ssutch3 9y ago

In real-live-production workloads I've had nothing but pain with MongoDB. They see more like a marketing and sales team piggybacking on a strange and immature database technology.

jijji 9y ago

ride that gravy train till there is no more gravy

manigandham 9y ago

As usual, the confusion and religious comments are numerous. There is no such thing as "nosql". There are different types of databases, with traditional relational being useful for 95% of scenarios (especially on increasingly fast servers with decent replication features) while the rest of the time something more specific is needed. SQL is just an interface, obviously common to relational databases but can be applied to any datastore. Spark/Drill/Presto/Dremio/etc can give you SQL over any data, even just files in a folder somewhere, so let's clear up this notion between actual database technology and the access path. Document stores are definitely useful. MongoDB is one of the better ones today although it had a rocky start. RethinkDB was an interesting experiment but never matured, RavenDB is a solid contender, Couchbase has proven itself, Riak might stick around, and there are dozens of others. There is a place for everything and MongoDB is being used by plenty of companies to great extent. It might not always be the right choice but when it is, it works incredibly well. Good luck to the team, I'm glad to see the success in both the product and the company.

philliphaydon 9y ago
Marten > RavenDB!
- manigandham 9y ago
  In some cases, but ravendb 4.0 is natively clustered and has more querying capabilities and performance when using all of the document store functionality.
lstyls 9y ago
> There is no such thing as nosql This is not at all correct. SQL has well defined semantics that are standardized around the relational model and ACID guarantees. A nosql datastore is one that intentionally makes tradeoffs that force it to deviate from that model. The name makes sense if you understand that SQL was the first broadly adopted language that targeted the relational model. I'm not very familiar with the systems you mention other than Presto. But if they do not provide relational guarantees then even if they have SQL-like syntax the semantics are sufficiently different for them to not be implementing a true SQL. Hence, nosql.

KB 9y ago

Having gone through a few acquisitions where MongoDB was used, I would never recommend using it from a legal/compliance perspective. You either have to pay for a very expensive commercial license OR adhere to their AGPL license (which is very difficult). https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/ https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/GNU-AGPL-3.0.txt https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/GNU-AGPL-3.0.tx...

gaadd33 9y ago
Why do you need a commercial license or have to do anything special for AGPL compliance if you aren't modifying the codebase and using the binaries from Mongo's website/repo? It looks like all of the drivers you would use to connect to it are Apache 2.0 licensed so that wouldn't be a reason.

mathattack 9y ago

Interesting valuation. 8x revenue is a success for SaaS companies. They were initially priced at $20/share, which would imply ~9.5x revenue. At $32/share they're at ~16x revenue. Very steep. They also fail the VC "rule of 40" where SaaS companies should have growth plus margins equal to 40%. (50% growth and negative 10% margins, or 10% growth and 30% margins) They seem to be at 50% growth, but minus 40% margins. Somehow they pulled it off. Great for them!

dx034 9y ago
For non-tech people, MongoDB often represents areas such as "big data". I work with a lot of people that have very little tech knowledge and the name comes up frequently to demonstrate that you're hip. It's the same that being on AWS convinces investors because running your own servers is so yesterday. Only Hadoop probably has an even bigger name. That's what everyone connects with machine learning and AI, so every big company needs a Hadoop cluster.

karmapolic 9y ago

The oracle of the NoSql world.

bad_user 9y ago

The irony of the situation is that MongoDB is now pretty good at horizontal scalability, probably because of all the big companies that were fooled into using it, which then had to fix it :-) Seeing the comments in this thread, it's interesting how it gets compared with PostgreSQL. People are missing the point — NoSQL only happened because of horizontal scalability requirements, being the number one reason for why people want NoSQL. Just because PostgreSQL can now store and interrogate JSON, that doesn't mean that PostgreSQL can scale horizontally. In fact PostgreSQL sucks at horizontal scaling, historically its replication story has been worse than MySQL actually. And might not have big data, but you might want redundancy and scenarios with pretty tight SLAs are not uncommon at all.

jamaicahest 9y ago

>Twenty-one percent of respondents told industry site StackOverflow that MongoDB was the most popular database, second only to versions from the dominant technology, SQL, which traces its roots back to legacy technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are legacy technology companies? What kind of hipster journalist wrote this article?

gerbilly 9y ago

Maybe machines are too fast today. Back in the 70s, even departmental computers were slow. This might have forced better engineering choices onto the product designers. The difference between and O( n log n) algorithm and an O(n^2) one could have made the difference between a decent product and a totally unusable one. Nowadays, toy examples can seem to work fine even when the products have really terrible implementations.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

goldfishcaura 9y ago

Who would have though given that at some point this "Don't use MongoDB" seemed to have taken over HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081