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MongoDB Raises $150 Million at $1.2 Billion Valuation
- junto 13y agoCool, time to make MongoDb web scale! :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
- kailuowang 13y agoThat video is a bit unfair. I went to the MongoDB conference in NYC this year. None of the 10gen engineers made such silver bullet claims. They strengthened again and again that MongoDB is with significant limitations and scaling it requires a lot of effort and creativity from the client developer side. That being said, I do wish they can use this investment to do more feature development than marketing.
- untog 13y agoThat video is three years old, though.
- ameoba 13y ago...but you can be sure that it's going to be posted every time MongoDB comes up. Somehow, people will vote it up as if it's still funny or adds something to the discussion.
- junto 13y agoI know. I added the smiley face because I meant it tongue in cheek.
- creamyhorror 13y agoI like this bug report about pymongo (not the MongoDB core itself): https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/PYTHON-532 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/PYTHON-532 - Step 1. Use Mongo as WEB SCALE DOCUMENT STORE OF CHOICE LOL ... Step 7. DISCOVER PYMONGO DOES NOT CHECK RETURN VALUES IN MULTIPLE PLACES. DISCOVER ORIGINAL AUTHOR SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED NEAR COMPUTER
- rpedela 13y agoOne of the best bug reports I have ever read!
- threeseed 13y agoOnly if you're a 5 year old. It's immature, unhelpful and generally pretty pathetic.
- _sh 13y agoLighten up. The submitter identified exactly the line and commit that enabled crashing all mongo deployments with a 16-byte post (I presume, from the report). Considering the circumstances, I congratulate the submitter on being so whimsical. if (strcmp(buffer + position + 5, "$ref") == 0) { / DBRef */ Seriously?
- alexholehouse 13y agoSlightly off topic, but at what point does "big data" just become data? According to wikipedia (which is in line with how I think about big data) "Big data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. " However, as "big data" becomes more mainstream and more tools/services exist to accommodate data at the peta/exobyte scale does that whole definition stop being relevant for kinds of data we're talking about?
- CmonDev 13y agoIt's just a buzzword now. "Let's use cloud to do big data analysis to proactively synergise our core competencies".
- frostmatthew 13y agoyou forgot "disrupt"
- npguy 13y agoYou have to be careful when you question big data. It is not recommended. http://fakevalley.com/tech-executive-fired-for-not-using-big-data-in-three-consecutive-meetings/akevalley.com/tech-executive-fired-for-not-using-big-data-in-three-consecutive-meetings/ http://fakevalley.com/tech-executive-fired-for-not-using-big...
- kubiiii 13y agoI guess so and 16 MB was certainely considered too large and complex to process it with traditionel data processing applications a few decades ago.
- Keyframe 13y agoCmonDev put it nicely. Buzzword. Same when you hear, most of the time, how someone is leveraging Hadoop for whatever. There are various definitions of what is big data. I like to think of it as whenever the only way to deal with your data is by doing full table scans, then we're in same domain of thinking of big data.
- mratzloff 13y ago> MongoDB ... now has about 600 customers, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and MetLife Inc. I wonder what services they sell to scale it to those customers. It sure doesn't come that way out of the box. Any Mongo customers here?
- albedo 13y agoGS doesn't use it for applications that require massive scaling, they already have their own infrastructure in place for that.
- mratzloff 13y agoThat's what I was hinting at. MongoDB, the company, is trading on the Goldman name, but Goldman isn't using it for scaling at all.
- xradionut 13y agoGS probably resells it to unsuspecting investors as a "AAA" database engine. :)
- nasalgoat 13y agoI'm a Mongo customer. Their customer service is probably the best I've had from an Enterprise vendor in terms of response time and general quality. Unfortunately, the product itself is so poor I am forced to get the support, and even then I've managed to stump their senior engineers quite a bit with my "impossible" problems.
- gaius 13y agoPick any company in the Fortune 500, then pick any technology you like and I bet it's in there somewhere. That's simply the nature of organizations with 100,000 employees in a dozen countries.
- mathattack 13y agoImpressive. And they're actually a real big data company, not one just tagging big data onto what they do.
- dharshanr 13y agoIf you having issues managing or scaling MongoDB you need to use a service like MongoDirector.com - make its really easy to deploy and scale shards (even in your own cloud account)
- kansface 13y agoMongo shards are not the answer: http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb Per the article, Mongo picks just P out of CAP ...
- alphadevx 13y agoI know they're hiring like crazy in their new office in Dublin. Big growth spurt, massive cash injection, interesting to see if they become the first big "enterprisey" NoSQL provider.
- dkhenry 13y agoCongratulations Mongo. Hopefully they can keep up the pace of improvements they have done over the past few years.
- sethbannon 13y agoThis is more great news for the NYC startup ecosystem.
- ConAntonakos 13y agoI wholeheartedly agree. Kudos to MongoDB, Inc. It's a great NoSQL database that's gaining traction.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- untog 13y ago$1.2bn seems utterly mad to me, but kudos to them for getting it.
- cmdkeen 13y agoWell they've not got $1.2bn, they've got $150 million. There is nothing to say that they will be able to float or get bought at a similar valuation. I can't see any of the investing arguments for MongoDB that even Facebook had. The whole space is full of competition for starters.
- untog 13y agoThat's what I meant - I was congratulating them on getting the $1.2bn valuation. Agreed that there is a lot of competition and little certainty out there, though.
- hrjet 13y agoMySQL was bought in cash by Sun for $1 billion. Of course, Sun collapsed after that, so perhaps you are right about the madness.
- X4 13y agoImagine what SUN could have built, if they had $1 billion in cash to spent on a Database. Stupid managers wouldn't let them, but they spent $1 billion on a hyped DB with questionable quality.
- mbreese 13y agoI always thought of the MySQL purchase as a last desperate attempt to get their geek mojo back. Not something that they could have done with an in house solution (quickly). It still didn't work, but I don't think they were just trying to buy a database.
- mcosta 13y agoYou can't buy user base.
- rpedela 13y agoIs MongoDB going to fix their scalability, performance, JOIN, and data type support problems with the money? Seems like a bad investment to me since a lot of developers are starting to move away from it because of those problems and others.
- throwawayyyz 13y agoI'm pretty sure their download numbers say otherwise. One or two HN threads complaining about MongoDB every month are not a good indicator for their future success.
- crazytony 13y agoIn the short term it's probably inversely proportional: more 'complaints' means more people on the platform (or at least experimenting with the platform). In the long term we're all dead anyway.
- AlisdairO 13y agoYeah. FWIW, working at $BIGCORP, I'm starting to hear buzz around Mongo from quite a few not-very-technical people. I'm pretty negative on Mongo as a technology, but there's no doubt that it's generated a lot of attention.
- ddorian43 13y agowhat are the data type problems?
- jzwinck 13y agoWell, some of us have been asking for a native high-resolution time type for three years: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1460 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1460
- rudiger 13y agoCan't you just store it in a regular 64-bit integer and know it's a datetime from your application's logic? What do you gain with a native, high-resolution datatime type?
- mbesto 13y agoCurious - what systems has MongoDB replaced in enterprise companies (like Goldman Sachs, etc)?
- pacofvf 13y agoMainly in-house made no-sql databases.
- jzwinck 13y agoI think a common answer would be "text files." And of course, grep and awk.
- dopamean 13y agoI'd never replace awk.
- mattdeboard 13y agoWe're replacing at least one collection with text files. That's half Mongo's fault, half our fault for using it to store the kind of info we're storing.
- claudiowilson 13y agoI don't think MongoDB should be replacing systems, it should rather be used as a data store for things that otherwise wouldn't be stored because of the high throughput needs, but aren't necessarily critical data.
- threeseed 13y agoI've worked at enterprise companies with MongoDB deployments. It is replacing Oracle databases which everybody is sick of. And given that most companies aren't clustering it is pretty much a simple drop in and replace scenario.
- gregwebs 13y agoPlease use this money to buy the TokuTek fork. I always expected the storage layer to have made much greater progress by now.
- teh_klev 13y agoIt's a shame they didn't think about the name a bit longer. In the UK "Mongo" is a fairly disparaging term and I find it hard to pitch MongoDB to customers because of this.
- bigdubs 13y agoThis is, actually, a real concern. So many companies that want to make a foray into enterprise sales don't think carefully about things that (on the surface) seem inconsequential but are actually hurting your business.
- yapcguy 13y agoYou're right. It's still hard to recommend GIMP to someone looking for an alternative to Photoshop. Mongo is likely to be a similar distraction: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mong http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mong
- sigzero 13y agoIt doesn't seem to be hurting them at all actually. Mong, mongo/mongodb are not the same word it seems either. So whoever would make that cognitive connection would be wrong anyway.
- guynamedloren 13y agoI hope you're not a consultant building web apps for non-technical clients, because if that's the case, I can't imagine the scenario in which it would be necessary to 'pitch MongoDB'.
- teh_klev 13y agoWith the best will in the world, even with non-technical clients it's hard to not let slip some technical language.
- jeltz 13y agoIt means the same thing in several other countries, including Sweden.
- bborud 13y agoGood, now they only need to deliver a database :)
- tolitius 13y agoor, given the quality of existing async/fsync guarantees, they'd be better off with just taking the money and running.. away.. fast
- jbverschoor 13y agoI was already moving away from mongo
- troymc 13y agoI'm curious what you're moving to.
- orthecreedence 13y agoI'm moving away too (er, have already moved). I have chosen RethinkDB and am very happy with it so far. I think the most important thing to me is that the Rethink guys haven't lied about the database's capabilities and limitations. 10gen did. Both in their marketing and in their sales pitch to us when I worked at Aol. Never once did anybody mention a global write lock when we were talking to them about a write-heavy application.
- zshprompt 13y agoYesterday I was just talking to some folks about how they lock on the DATABASE for a transaction. Yey.
- moox 13y agoYour folks were wrong. They lock on the collection and only on some types of queries.
- scottbessler 13y agoNo, they lock the entire database for every write. "MongoDB uses a readers-writer [1] lock that allows concurrent reads access to a database but gives exclusive access to a single write operation." "Beginning with version 2.2, MongoDB implements locks on a per-database basis for most read and write operations. Some global operations, typically short lived operations involving multiple databases, still require a global “instance” wide lock. Before 2.2, there is only one “global” lock per mongod instance." source: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/concurrency/ http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/concurrency/
- MichaelGG 13y agoYes that's the part that just kills me. It was a system-wide lock, and now it's just per-DB. I just don't see how anyone can take that seriously. Also, why bother with a buffer pool manager when you've got mmap, right?
- tcgv 13y agoI have been using MongoDB every once in a while and I think it is great. The C# driver has linq support which increases productivity to the roof. However, the feature I miss the most while using MongoDB is multi document transaction support. Their site provides a workaround[1] that from my point of view is not worth implementing. Instead I prefer to switch back to traditional SQL databases in those situations. [1] http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/perform-two-phase-commits/ http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/perform-two-phase-co...
- nlavezzo 13y agoYou're not alone in this interest - we hear that as a pain point a lot. If you're really interested in this, keep an eye on this page: https://foundationdb.com/layers https://foundationdb.com/layers :)
- frostnovazzz 13y agoA month ago I was contacted by a recruiter about some engineering opportunity. I was surprised to know that MongoDB gives me the feeling of Tech company like G or FB. I always thought of MongoDB as kind of an open source product. I started to learn how it operate as a business. I think this is a sign that enterprise-targeted business are rising, and there will be more and more of this kind of start ups in the future.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- davidu 13y agoAnyone have estimates what their revenue or run-rate is?
- neovive 13y agoAny recommendations for a good MongoDB book or course?
- arkham 13y agoThe 2nd Edition of the MongoDB: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly is one I can recommend (full disclosure: I was a technical reviewer on that edition). http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028031.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028031.do For basics, the Little MongoDB Book (http://openmymind.net/2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book/ http://openmymind.net/2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book/) is a bit dated at this stage, but a good starting point. Finally, there are free MongoDB courses available at http://education.mongodb.com http://education.mongodb.com in various flavors of programming language, as well as an ops/DBA focused course.
- joeblau 13y agoBest MongoDB training I had was to be at a company where they throw it into production, it crashed almost every day and then we got 10Gen to train us on what was going on. I got experience and wisdom all in a very short time.
- vdaniuk 13y agoYep, mongodb is launching their own moocs https://education.mongodb.com https://education.mongodb.com
- ateevchopra 13y agoCongratulations to the team ! Finally hardwork they have done is paying off. Hope you will continue to make awesome fast databases like ever !
- geertj 13y agoCongrats to MongoDB. But for me they became pretty much irrelevant after PostgreSQL 9.1 added a JSON datatype.
- gregwebs 13y agoPostgres 9.2 gives you the ability to index and query JSON, but you still can't atomically update portions of the JSON which is very limiting.
- giulianob 13y agoIt seems 9.2 can solve a lot of use cases but when they have partial updates, I'll cry tears of joy.
- postfuturist 13y agoIt's a common technique to serialize arbitrary data into blob fields in SQL databases--I've seen it for years. Usually, it is considered an anti-pattern. Postgres 9.1 doesn't do much other than verify the JSON data is valid JSON and then stores it unchanged, though successive versions are adding more first-class JSON support.
- jameshart 13y agoI wonder to what extent the AGPL license actually facilitates the creation of a commercial business based on the software; large online service customers who would be willing to use even GPL software without paying anybody for it might be more likely to opt to negotiate a commercial license for AGPL code. If that is the case, though, and their revenue model is based on providing non-AGPL access to MongoDB, doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL?
- mason55 13y ago> doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL? While the MongoDB product is open source and licensed under the AGPL, they very rarely accept outside contributions. A vast majority of the product was built by 10gen/MongoDB, so this is less of an issue than it would be for something like Postgres.
- jameshart 13y agoWhich seems like further evidence that the use of AGPL is somewhat disingenuous - more a poison-pill than a genuine attempt to embrace free software principles. If I use MongoDB, and modify it to suit my needs, I have to make my changes available to anyone who consumes a service I back with my modified MongoDB. MongoDB Inc., presumably by virtue of having licensing agreements in place with all the copyright holders whose code is in their core distribution of the product, have the ability not to do that. They could, however, examine my improvements and do a cleanroom reimplementation of them. The real risk to them is that a vastly improved fork of MongoDB is built up by contributors who don't license over their contributions to MongoDB Inc., preventing their incorporation into commercial licensed versions...
- mason55 13y ago> The real risk to them is that a vastly improved fork of MongoDB is built up by contributors who don't license over their contributions to MongoDB Inc., preventing their incorporation into commercial licensed versions... aka MariaDB :)
- venus 13y agoWell let me be the first to say that I think that is an absolutely fucking crazy valuation and that MongoDB are either nuts or disingenuous for signing up for it. I would be astounded - astounded - if MongoDB generate even a tenth of that, just in revenue, ever. One point two billion dollars. You have got to be kidding me. You have got to be fucking kidding me.
- Confusion 13y agoFortunately there is no startup bubble.
- venus 13y agoThank goodness for that! If there was, this development would be quite concerning.
- pc 13y agoI hate to be That Guy, but I think this demands a bit more rigor. $1.2B is certainly a big number, but let's unpack what it means. Do you think it's impossible that MongoDB gets to $100M of net income? For a company that sells to the enterprise and whose product has significant adoption, that definitely doesn't sound implausible to me. Given their financials and growth figures, how would you value MongoDB?
- yo-mf 13y agoDear "That Guy", spot on.
- venus 13y agoI don't know. I haven't seen these financials. But it's a frigging database, and not a particularly good one. A billion dollars!? Look, I'm not claiming to be omniscient. I'm sure they're smart people. But would you buy stock in MongoDB at a 1.2b valuation? Would you? As for me - Absolutely not.
- pc 13y ago
- bane 13y agoI bet In-Q-Tel is very happy with this. Between MongoDB and Palantir their recent investments have been doing really well.
- epoxyhockey 13y agoThey have the easiest job in the world. They invest in a company, then have their deep-pocketed client buy services from that company.
- jskonhovd 13y agoadd Digital Reasoning to that list very soon.
- leokun 13y agoExciting to think what this might mean for RethinkDB some day. :)
- ffrryuu 13y agoThese valuations makes joining MongoDB right now a very bad idea.
- tolitius 13y agoOk. Time to change how the hype and good marketing drive mediocre products, with average people behind it, to silly valuations. So here it comes. It is only a VALUE if WE say it is. So here is what I say. I value * Redis @ $4.5B * Datomic @ $4.5B * Riak @ $3.2B * Hazelcast @ $3.0B * HBase @ $2.5B * Spanner @ $2.1B * Neo4j @ $2.0B * MongoDB @ N/A Congratulations to MongoDB sales and marketing team (really!). It is a tough job to sell a trojan horse to masses.
- threeseed 13y agoLook clearly you have zero understanding of how enterprises work. And given you have added Hazelcast which is a distributed in-memory solution in there shows you have a poor understanding of technology as well. It is all about support. Big companies have operations teams who manage infrastructure and deployments. They aren't experts in databases and so want to be able to ring someone who can help them when the times get tough. 10gen understands this and have a great support story to talk about hence their popularity. Most OSS don't.
- tolitius 13y agoa simple fact that you get defensive and personal reveals that you are not happy with your confidence level. but that's ok, as you get more mature, and acquire a certain perception depth (and I wish you do), you'll prefer being constructive vs. angry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Hazelcast solves similar problem that all of the valuations in the list: "storing and retrieving data". By the way, "file system" does it too (let's valuate it as well @ $3.6B). As far as "enterprise support" in case of Mongo, it's like running a political campaign: nobody really knows "who" is inside, until "he" gets elected, and when "he" does, the "support" needs to make sure reality stays hidden, by white (and not so white) lies. And yes, MongoDB is great at "support", most OSS aren't.
- mkhalil 13y agoWhenever I see something like this, I can't help but think this is just a business deal. Nothing to do with technology. Rich business men are going to get richer because they can get away with over-valuing technology and tricking their non-tech savy investors into thinking this will make them a buttload. Some sort of quasi-pyramid scheme.
- dpweb 13y agoNot a fan of Mongo personally, but understand the context of what is happening in corporate IT. Slashing and commoditization. They look at the $10M line item for Oracle and say wait a minute.. The last section of the article was the most telling.. We replace the millions $ and staff with a $5000 server. Just like trading in your US employee for an offshore replacement at 1/5th the cost. They love that message. Remember too, the quality of the tech is one factor (way down on the list) in decision making of what these companies buy. As far as the tech, Relational DB is certainly not the problem and even if it was, Mongo wouldn't be the solution. Mongo's riding the wave of slash and burn, and Oracle has pissed on more than a few customers over the years, basically with the attitude.. "where you gonna go!" Any company gets a toe-hold in big companies like Mongo has gonna be looked on very favorably by Wall St right now.. Mongo will get bought for sure, the valuation is not that nuts.
- hacknat 13y agoThis is crazy. If I had known that I could gin up money for a crappy database I would have written one. This seems unfair, but we'll be joking about this in 10-15 years.
- dschiptsov 13y agoNow we could see how deceptive sales technologies and media manipulations are leading to ridiculous valuations instead of any new technologies or even appropriate (for a persistent storage engine) design decisions. Still enjoying table-level locking on writes and lack of atomic writes in so-called transactions at $1,2B valuation?) The same story as it was of MySQL prior to stabilized InnoDB (5.1.x) an extremely popular crap with table-level locks, silent data conversions and millions of ignorant 'satisfied customers'. By the same logic PHP must be valued at one trillion - millions of satisfied cheap coders, and, you know, Facebook was written in it.)