8 ms·

Who are the large Mongo customers? It “seems” like it died 10-15 years ago, but clearly they’re still going.

by cmer 4y ago

simondotau 4y ago
I don’t know anything about the actual numbers behind Mongo, but I question whether Mongo need many large customers to justify their business model? Lucee is able to run a stable, ongoing open source software business by taking a fraction of Adobe ColdFusion’s legacy customer base—most of whom switched explicitly for price reasons and probably haven’t given the Lucee corporation a single cent.
neeleshs 4y ago
They seem to be indeed going strong. I don't really see a viable alternative to MongoDB (document db). Fits well in a lot of use cases. Edit: we (Syncari) use MongoDB, we are not a very large customer but have a cluster that handles billions of documents
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  No viable alternative? Why not one of the many other document db's, such as CouchDB? Genuinely curious what MongoDB does better in general than all the other document oriented databases.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Because MongoDB is web scale. (Honest answer: a company can continue way longer than you think just supporting legacy customers - need Lotus Notes? https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes )
  - PheonixPharts 4y ago
    > what MongoDB does better Hosting and infrastructure? Sure for your weekend project there are plenty of alternatives. At enterprise level you aren't paying for just the base product you're paying to have someone else worry about all the other stuff that keeps it up and running. Yes you can find Couchdb hosting services but it's very nice to have the company that builds the product also control the hosting. I've worked at a company that was fairly large MongoDB customers. Even though MongoDB was a major part of our overall product there was never a second of considering hosting our own solution, and there was likewise never a time I remember Mongo being responsible for a major outage or other infrastructure issue. That's worth quite a lot of money to not have to worry about an essential part of your own internal product infra.
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      I see, so it's more the managed infrastructure than the actual DB itself?
- asadawadia 4y ago
  >Fits well in a lot of use cases. Can you share the use cases? Why Mongo works better than Postgres?
  - NomDePlum 4y ago
    Mongo (similar for other NoSql propositions) is most suitable for specific data access patterns. The most obvious one being where you are requesting data and related data based upon a unique business identifier. NoSql DBs mostly make this both trivial and fast. Postgres and other SQL options become relevant where aggregation and reporting become primary considerations.
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      Just to explain a little bit why the notion you're pointing to is incorrect -- identity and referential integrity fundamental concepts in the "SQL options" i.e. relational database management systems (RDBMS), based on the relational model[0], rooted in relational algebra[1]. NoSQL Databases arose from a realization that sometimes you don't need all the features of a relational database, for example: - Redis which at the most basic level is a key value cache - MongoDB which stores (denormalized) documents NoSQL Databases like MongoDB are best when: - All data related to a certain entity can be reasonably self contained (i.e. does not require relating to other possibly dynamic pieces of data) - referential integrity (knowing that User.storeId can be treated as just a string) does not need to be maintained - Constraint checking does not need to be performed or can be performed at the application level - Schemas are either wildly variable or do not change at all, or checking them just isn't important. The best example I hear often is a news site or blog -- if your main model is something like an Article that contains the author, content, tags and all data necessary to display one entry (and 99% of the time you get one Article and are not required to request related data that exist in separate collections), then NoSQL makes sense. It's a tired conversation I think people have had repeatedly for a long time, so I won't go into it again (I'm also VERY biased towards RDBMS and in particular Postgres) -- would love to hear from experienced MongoDB proponents though! One case I know Mongo was trusted for very early on was large scale out use cases, and after WiredTiger their execution engine improved immensely as well. I assume it's still great for that, where scale out is often quite lacking in RDBMS or not in the core experience. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database#Relational_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database#Relational... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
The bson interface of the mogodb API, a commercial friendly license, and mutable collection structures. It certainly isn’t the optimal solution for every application, but it does make sense in some roles. Also, I look at projects which have survived over a decade rather fondly. ;)
adoxyz 4y ago
https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb MongoDB is anything but dead. Also MongoDB isn't even 15 years old, so how could it have died 15 years ago? Disclaimer: ex-MongoDB employee.
pipe_connector 4y ago
Mongo has customers at some of the largest technology companies around and perhaps the best-in-class cloud-agnostic managed service. There's less hype than when the webscale video came out, but they've successfully converted a good bit of that hype into a solid platform with happy customers. I've seen a lot of Mongo new deployments even still.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  I worked at BigCo that everyone knows about for quite awhile and when I left a couple years ago they were heavily investing in MongoDB for greenfield projects. It ended up being my organization’s (somewhat large, several thousand employees) de jure database for new projects. Mongo is going to be around for awhile. Personally I disliked it, primarily due to personal bias towards RDBMS (most data is inherently relational and I saw a lot of unnecessary hoops getting jumped through to join data) and also because the driver situation was absolutely terrible when I had to work with it. Custom drivers to serialize almost any JSON data was incredibly annoying.
  - redwood 4y ago
    This "inherently relational" trope, in my view, is a sign that we've all deeply normalized normalization in our brains.. it's funny it's even in the nomenclature.. "normal". Yet denormalization is how our brains actually think: is it possible that all along we've been contorting ourselves to the 1970s machine and that that's no longer necessary?
datalopers 4y ago
> Who are the large Mongo customers? Companies that adopted this technical debt during its prime (2010-2015) and are now paying for enterprise licenses and support to service that debt.
mathattack 4y ago
Most large corporations. They have a very formal and tight process for spinning up Oracle instances, so the developers go to Mongo because it’s easy. Once it’s in production it’s very hard to rip out, and the salespeople jack up prices every year. God forbid you get more than 2 years behind on upgrades and it’s more fees. Internal IT departments get stuck with growing masses of instances that are hard to replace with their 1 yr planning cycles. MongoDB blends the commercial aggressiveness of Oracle with the audit mindset of IBM. The sleaziest in the game.
- prepend 4y ago
  I get an email about once a year claiming I use mongodb and am not paying license fees. It’s really weird because they’ll say stuff like a system I designed is based on mongodb and they have “evidence” from project staff. It’s such a strange claim and I guess they don’t know I made the system. It’s also strange because they keep demanding license fees and asking to audit and I just deny and tell them to buzz off. They remind me of Oracle. It also makes me wonder if there’s some legal compulsion that could force them to do discovery. Based on their behavior I would not use mongodb.
  - tehlike 4y ago
    Looks like an automated email.
    - prepend 4y ago
      It seems like it’s from a human. It’s from the same person and it is worded differently each time with oddly specific claims. They also email other people in my org asking to connect with me because they think I’m misusing licenses.
  - potamic 4y ago
    I wonder if it's a use case to sue them. Such things can be disruptive to business and is no different from someone calling a bomb hoax.
  - 4y ago
kingbossman 4y ago
Not a huge Mongo customer, but the startup I work at uses MongoDB exclusively as our database across our different services. As someone who worked as an SRE at a database company with a DBaaS product, MongoDB Atlas is by far the best DBaaS platform I've used. From an operations standpoint it's fantastic. From a developer standpoint it's alright, we're getting to the scale now where we're thinking about migrating to a more global architecture and I'm glad we're using something like Mongo over trying to hack this out with Postgres. The standard issues with trying to use MongoDB like a regular ol' SQL DB still apply though, and our developers (me included) still fall into using anti-patterns and have to speak with solutions engineers once in a while.
- tehlike 4y ago
  What kind of scale does the company have from qps etc pov?
jd_mongodb 4y ago
Try typing "mongodb customers" into Google. Here is a few I know are public references: MetLife, Epic Games, Bosch, Inland Revenue (UK), Department of Work and pensions (UK) Barclays, HSBC, Boots, Forbes, Toyota, Sanoma, Intuit, Verizon.
dzonga 4y ago
video game companies fo sho
cultofmetatron 4y ago
friends don't let friends use mongodb. but in all seriousness. hstore is good enough for 99% of mongodb users
- redwood 4y ago
  Isn't it experimental?
niscocity35 4y ago
Startups. When you are not sure how to map data relationships yet, MongoDB is the best tool. You can easily build a prototype without worrying about the database. MongoDB Community Edition is a powerful software.

Who are the large Mongo customers? It “seems” like it died 10-15 years ago, but clearly they’re still going.

by cmer 4y ago

Who are the large Mongo customers? It “seems” like it died 10-15 years ago, but clearly they’re still going.

I don’t know anything about the actual numbers behind Mongo, but I question whether Mongo need many large customers to justify their business model? Lucee is able to run a stable, ongoing open source software business by taking a fraction of Adobe ColdFusion’s legacy customer base—most of whom switched explicitly for price reasons and probably haven’t given the Lucee corporation a single cent.

neeleshs 4y ago

They seem to be indeed going strong. I don't really see a viable alternative to MongoDB (document db). Fits well in a lot of use cases. Edit: we (Syncari) use MongoDB, we are not a very large customer but have a cluster that handles billions of documents

bigDinosaur 4y ago
No viable alternative? Why not one of the many other document db's, such as CouchDB? Genuinely curious what MongoDB does better in general than all the other document oriented databases.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Because MongoDB is web scale. (Honest answer: a company can continue way longer than you think just supporting legacy customers - need Lotus Notes? https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes )
- PheonixPharts 4y ago
  > what MongoDB does better Hosting and infrastructure? Sure for your weekend project there are plenty of alternatives. At enterprise level you aren't paying for just the base product you're paying to have someone else worry about all the other stuff that keeps it up and running. Yes you can find Couchdb hosting services but it's very nice to have the company that builds the product also control the hosting. I've worked at a company that was fairly large MongoDB customers. Even though MongoDB was a major part of our overall product there was never a second of considering hosting our own solution, and there was likewise never a time I remember Mongo being responsible for a major outage or other infrastructure issue. That's worth quite a lot of money to not have to worry about an essential part of your own internal product infra.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    I see, so it's more the managed infrastructure than the actual DB itself?
asadawadia 4y ago
>Fits well in a lot of use cases. Can you share the use cases? Why Mongo works better than Postgres?
- NomDePlum 4y ago
  Mongo (similar for other NoSql propositions) is most suitable for specific data access patterns. The most obvious one being where you are requesting data and related data based upon a unique business identifier. NoSql DBs mostly make this both trivial and fast. Postgres and other SQL options become relevant where aggregation and reporting become primary considerations.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    Just to explain a little bit why the notion you're pointing to is incorrect -- identity and referential integrity fundamental concepts in the "SQL options" i.e. relational database management systems (RDBMS), based on the relational model[0], rooted in relational algebra[1]. NoSQL Databases arose from a realization that sometimes you don't need all the features of a relational database, for example: - Redis which at the most basic level is a key value cache - MongoDB which stores (denormalized) documents NoSQL Databases like MongoDB are best when: - All data related to a certain entity can be reasonably self contained (i.e. does not require relating to other possibly dynamic pieces of data) - referential integrity (knowing that User.storeId can be treated as just a string) does not need to be maintained - Constraint checking does not need to be performed or can be performed at the application level - Schemas are either wildly variable or do not change at all, or checking them just isn't important. The best example I hear often is a news site or blog -- if your main model is something like an Article that contains the author, content, tags and all data necessary to display one entry (and 99% of the time you get one Article and are not required to request related data that exist in separate collections), then NoSQL makes sense. It's a tired conversation I think people have had repeatedly for a long time, so I won't go into it again (I'm also VERY biased towards RDBMS and in particular Postgres) -- would love to hear from experienced MongoDB proponents though! One case I know Mongo was trusted for very early on was large scale out use cases, and after WiredTiger their execution engine improved immensely as well. I assume it's still great for that, where scale out is often quite lacking in RDBMS or not in the core experience. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database#Relational_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database#Relational... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

The bson interface of the mogodb API, a commercial friendly license, and mutable collection structures. It certainly isn’t the optimal solution for every application, but it does make sense in some roles. Also, I look at projects which have survived over a decade rather fondly. ;)

adoxyz 4y ago

https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb MongoDB is anything but dead. Also MongoDB isn't even 15 years old, so how could it have died 15 years ago? Disclaimer: ex-MongoDB employee.

pipe_connector 4y ago

Mongo has customers at some of the largest technology companies around and perhaps the best-in-class cloud-agnostic managed service. There's less hype than when the webscale video came out, but they've successfully converted a good bit of that hype into a solid platform with happy customers. I've seen a lot of Mongo new deployments even still.

SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
I worked at BigCo that everyone knows about for quite awhile and when I left a couple years ago they were heavily investing in MongoDB for greenfield projects. It ended up being my organization’s (somewhat large, several thousand employees) de jure database for new projects. Mongo is going to be around for awhile. Personally I disliked it, primarily due to personal bias towards RDBMS (most data is inherently relational and I saw a lot of unnecessary hoops getting jumped through to join data) and also because the driver situation was absolutely terrible when I had to work with it. Custom drivers to serialize almost any JSON data was incredibly annoying.
- redwood 4y ago
  This "inherently relational" trope, in my view, is a sign that we've all deeply normalized normalization in our brains.. it's funny it's even in the nomenclature.. "normal". Yet denormalization is how our brains actually think: is it possible that all along we've been contorting ourselves to the 1970s machine and that that's no longer necessary?

datalopers 4y ago

> Who are the large Mongo customers? Companies that adopted this technical debt during its prime (2010-2015) and are now paying for enterprise licenses and support to service that debt.

mathattack 4y ago

Most large corporations. They have a very formal and tight process for spinning up Oracle instances, so the developers go to Mongo because it’s easy. Once it’s in production it’s very hard to rip out, and the salespeople jack up prices every year. God forbid you get more than 2 years behind on upgrades and it’s more fees. Internal IT departments get stuck with growing masses of instances that are hard to replace with their 1 yr planning cycles. MongoDB blends the commercial aggressiveness of Oracle with the audit mindset of IBM. The sleaziest in the game.

prepend 4y ago
I get an email about once a year claiming I use mongodb and am not paying license fees. It’s really weird because they’ll say stuff like a system I designed is based on mongodb and they have “evidence” from project staff. It’s such a strange claim and I guess they don’t know I made the system. It’s also strange because they keep demanding license fees and asking to audit and I just deny and tell them to buzz off. They remind me of Oracle. It also makes me wonder if there’s some legal compulsion that could force them to do discovery. Based on their behavior I would not use mongodb.
- tehlike 4y ago
  Looks like an automated email.
  - prepend 4y ago
    It seems like it’s from a human. It’s from the same person and it is worded differently each time with oddly specific claims. They also email other people in my org asking to connect with me because they think I’m misusing licenses.
- potamic 4y ago
  I wonder if it's a use case to sue them. Such things can be disruptive to business and is no different from someone calling a bomb hoax.
- 4y ago

kingbossman 4y ago

Not a huge Mongo customer, but the startup I work at uses MongoDB exclusively as our database across our different services. As someone who worked as an SRE at a database company with a DBaaS product, MongoDB Atlas is by far the best DBaaS platform I've used. From an operations standpoint it's fantastic. From a developer standpoint it's alright, we're getting to the scale now where we're thinking about migrating to a more global architecture and I'm glad we're using something like Mongo over trying to hack this out with Postgres. The standard issues with trying to use MongoDB like a regular ol' SQL DB still apply though, and our developers (me included) still fall into using anti-patterns and have to speak with solutions engineers once in a while.

tehlike 4y ago
What kind of scale does the company have from qps etc pov?

jd_mongodb 4y ago

Try typing "mongodb customers" into Google. Here is a few I know are public references: MetLife, Epic Games, Bosch, Inland Revenue (UK), Department of Work and pensions (UK) Barclays, HSBC, Boots, Forbes, Toyota, Sanoma, Intuit, Verizon.

dzonga 4y ago

video game companies fo sho

cultofmetatron 4y ago

friends don't let friends use mongodb. but in all seriousness. hstore is good enough for 99% of mongodb users

redwood 4y ago
Isn't it experimental?

niscocity35 4y ago

Startups. When you are not sure how to map data relationships yet, MongoDB is the best tool. You can easily build a prototype without worrying about the database. MongoDB Community Edition is a powerful software.