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At some point during the past 10 years or so, the world realized that document databases are actually a bad idea, and relational databases can do the same job b
by p-e-w 3y ago
At some point during the past 10 years or so, the world realized that document databases are actually a bad idea, and relational databases can do the same job better with just a few easy-to-implement QoL improvements (such as JSON operators in SQL).
Meanwhile MongoDB's creators thought this was a great time to make Mongo non-free software, presumably with the goal of making a quick buck from cloud operators.
The result is pretty much the landscape we are seeing today, with Postgres reigning supreme, and even SQLite being experimented with in server setups, while Mongo is on life support and MySQL not far behind.
- vmatsiiako 3y agoI wouldn't say "Mongo is on life support" – it's actually a very successful business growing 30% YoY on a massive scale. Yet, I agree that the license switch has definitely damaged their long-term ecosystem.
- smt88 3y agoThey grew 30% if you look at revenue, but that's not how people determine whether a business is healthy. EBITDA is a better metric, and that number was getting dramatically worse every year until 2023. But even in 2023, EBITDA was -$202M. I don't see it ever approaching $0. So it's still a shit business on top of a shit product that no one ever really needed.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoMongoDB is great if what you need is a replicated log or queue. It's what Kafka should have been.
- smt88 3y agoAs others have said, you can just use your RDBMS for that now. Mongo is a feature of better products.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoPostgres doesn't have a sane and working replication story. (Mysql does, but it's full of legacy warts, of course.) Mongodb is foolproof and works out of the box. The other alternative here isn't Mongodb, it's Couchdb, but that isn't an RDBMS.
- basil-rash 3y agoWhy do you choose EBITDA? Last I heard it was utter nonsense”, at least according to Warren Buffet. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tvnKylAyLbQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tvnKylAyLbQ
- phonon 3y agoTheir "Comprehensive Losses" for the last 3 years are (in thousands) (171,150) (343,375) (309,090) So there you go...
- librasteve 3y agothey lost 300 million in one year?
- christkv 3y agoStock compensation cash flow was positive meaning they added cash to their account.
- jeltz 3y agoAre they literally setting money on fire?
- roenxi 3y agoYou'd probably save time if you directly suggest what income metric you want to use. In the video, Buffet is basically saying he cares about income after interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. In other words, that he cares about actual income. That'd be very on-brand for Buffet. That measure won't be good for MongoDB Inc. either; they've been millions in the red for years. Losing $100 million in a year would be the best result they've achieved in a while now.
- _v7gu 3y agoso by Buffet's metric, Mongo is doing even worse
- 3y ago
- Joel_Mckay 3y agoI think anyone who administers mongodb would agree it has a list of very dangerous behaviors for novices. Try to upgrade a running instance node between some versions, and one may thrash object keys or worse. Best to dump and re-load your data every major upgrade to recover all set properties... and there still may be slight differences in the query language later. Wait, your data sets are 1.5TiB per node.... that is a lot of downtime... The cursor, projection, and re-format queries can be very good at reducing reporting traffic. However, the 3 page long syntax can be unreadable to the uninitiated. The json essentially jams a bunch of equivalent SQL queries in 1 transaction, but you still have to be careful as there is no real guarantee of ordering without auto-indices in clusters. mongodb is not as clean as SQL, but works for storing constantly changing meta data. i.e. if you find your SQL schema ends up with tuples that have a lot of poorly designed null entries, table edits, and or simply implements an object storage class abstraction in massive meta-data and object-class catch-all tables. And yes, the mongodb new licensing model telegraphs an unfavorable policy posture. However, I do understand not wanting fortune 500 companies exploiting your teams time for free. Profit is not an indication of quality, but rather fiscal utility. ;-)
- DrNash17 3y agowhat is mongo's new licensing model?
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoI was totally expecting someone to come up with some vanity metric here, but a negative EBITDA of several HUNDRED MILLION? Jesus. How did that happen. B2B business should be a symphony of ka-chings for them.
- dangtony98 3y agoI'm actually very bullish on MongoDB. While the article and significant sentiment in threads suggest a push off MongoDB toward PostgreSQL, I do think MongoDB has its own place in the stack and that it won't be obsoleted. I've personally had many pleasant experiences working with it in past projects. Regarding business metrics, I may have a slight bias coming from the startup world but we often value revenue the most, especially in the earlier stages of a company; we can reduce costs and perform various optimizations in the future but what stays at the foundation is whether or not there is strong product market fit such that more customers keep coming in and coming back to use the underlying product — I would say MongoDB's current growth trajectory is in line with that. I'm hopeful overall that they can turn profitable (maybe not this year or next but eventually so).
- smt88 3y agoHN should be full of Mongo's users and advocates, and yet this site loathes it. That by itself is a sign that it's a zombie. The reason we don't just look at revenue is that you can "buy" revenue with ads and sales teams. But if that revenue growth costs more than it pays because your customers aren't sticky, then your business doesn't work. You can't apply startup principles to this large, aging public company.
- mushi 3y ago“This site” loved ReThinkDB. How is it doing?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoI‘m not sure that is the case. What I‘m seeing is that people use the cloud-native document stores such as DynamoDB instead of Mongo. The only thing zoomers hate more than traditional SQL databases is XML.
- cwbriscoe 3y agoDoesn't everybody hate XML?
- tgv 3y agoDocument databases aren't an inherently bad idea. They have their uses. I'm using mongodb because it fits my use case: the app is very front-end oriented, and the data the user needs on a specific page fits neatly in one document. There are (quite a lot) related documents, but they are only needed in specific parts of the app, and that's when those are retrieved. Pretty simple. I could argue that in-server SQLite is a bad idea: if you ever need to share the database or distribute tasks, you're fucked. But for some use cases it just works. "The world" hasn't realized shit. It jumps from fad to fad, fueled by hyped promises and lack of experience.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoWhat about a Postgres database where you store your documents in a key value table of json objects? What mongodb benefits would you be missing?
- tgv 3y agoWhat benefit does switching to postgresql bring? When mongodb stops being maintained, I'll consider postgres, but until then, I now only see downsides.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoLot's of useful features? You can join data when needed, proper transactions, schemas where you need schemas. For example you start with a basic (key, json) table. Once you begin to stabilise your schema, add columns generated from your json objects, now you can get proper joins, indexes, validations, on said columns.