What an amazing amount of money. Apparently they have got $70m+ in total.
Our small/mid sized company with about 20 employees could operate for about 50 years with that amount of cash...
An apparently they already pay for themselves:
"“Business is fantastic,” 10gen President Max Schireson told me. “We keep outperforming every goal that we set for ourselves and the market just feels like it’s huge.” In fact, he said, new sales people pay for themselves almost immediately upon joining the company."
So I wonder what they are going to do with that huge pile of cash? R&D for a single DB surely can't be that expensive (or at least it would be difficult to get that many people to suddenly work on productive things that would actually improve the product and not just make it bloatware).
Apparently the hype works, for a DB that is about scaling but doesn't scale yet? "Just another $100m and we'll get there"?
How many people actually need a DB that "scales" better than mysql/postgres which are much easier to use and better supported and understood?
" Among other things, it has been criticized for being rather difficult to manage at scale. This is somewhat ironic, as scalability, along with the flexibility that comes with being schemaless, is among the driving factors behind the NoSQL movement. One would expect the most-popular of the bunch to scale with ease."
disclaimer: I used to work for Couchbase, and am still involved in the CouchDB community
'Magic Scaling' isnt the only reason people use alternative data stores such as Mongo (or Couch), in fact as shown it can often turn out to be a really bad idea to do so. I wouldnt still be interested in CouchDB if it was just 'do stuff a bit differently from mysql and everything will work at scale' type database.
Schemaless, Native JSON, master master replication, HTTP API are all features which can be hugely beneficial to particular applications over tradition RDBMS' (those were only a few features and they were probably bias towards CouchDB because I know that better)
Right, the schemaless and native JSON are the main reason I switched my products to MongoDB. Scalability is not an issue for 99% of the projects i've worked on.
Easier mapping between my domain model (I mainly use Smalltalk) and the persistence is a huge win.
I think your post proves the theory that they have a lot of product education work to do.
It's not just about scaling. IMO it's about teaching the vast armies of software developers that work on proprietary line-of-business software that there is variety in data stores and that they should be using the right tool for the job.
I shudder to think about how many EAV anti-patterns have been implemented on top of relational databases. Or how many 1-table-per-X databases there are. Or how many "json" columns and "blob" columns and "xml" columns have been added to otherwise innocent tables who did not deserve that kind of abuse.
That alone -- educating and giving tools and support to engineers outside of the tech industry -- is no easy task.
MongoDB is webscale, that's all you need to know, keep in mind that webscale means a database that will fit in 16 to 256 GB of RAM, and doesn't need transaction support.
Thanks for all the replies. I wasn't actually trying to put mongodb (or nosql in general) down, there sure is a use for these technologies.
The amount of money just seems staggering (money in the IT world nowadays seems to be off the charts, re. facebook et. al.), and it probably will be hard to put it all to productive use. But it will of course also help to improve the product so no worries :)
And indeed, I do have a relational database with a column that stores json! The horrors :)
You could help me get familiar with mongodb, any good real world tutorials for it? I have played with it just a little.
There is an official tutorial on http://mongodb.org, just click "Try It Out" in the top banner. Karl Seguin also wrote two great tutorials (one on basics, one on geo queries) at http://tutorial.mongly.com/.
You'd be surprised, "scaling" a database is something that more and more folks are having to do lately, with the onslaught of mobile apps and facebook apps and web apps, it's just a whole lot easier to create an application that gets hundreds of thousands of users - millions of users.
And more importantly, you can have an application that has hundreds of thousands of users and not really make a ton of money, so you kinda need something that is easy to use because you don't have the capital
But the important question here is: How big is the mug market? Every developer, I know, has a MongoDB mug already. This makes me question, how their mug strategy is going to be with this new investment?
> 10gen has invested heavily in ease of use and functionality early on rather than just speed and scalability. Because it’s so easy to use, MongoDB has attracted lots of web developers who don’t mind working around its scalability shortcomings
followed them from pretty early on, and I found the opposite was the case, with their heavy emphasis on the easiness of sharding, as well as coming out the gate with 'safe writes' turned off.
How do you feel about the open core nature of Riak? I mean, I would jump to it for some of my uses in a second, but I find that the lack of multi-dc replication support in the open source edition is kind of a killer for my use case. I have the reliability need, but I don't really have the heavy usage to support such an endeavor (as it's something of a personal project).
Let's face it, most companies are still built on relational database systems. I'm assuming that a lot of this money will go forward to changing this "culture" and injecting NoSQL into tech industries that have yet to adopt it.
...or they could just wait for the next generation of young developers to take leadership roles at BigCorp.
For years intel claimed that developers would never port their code from x86 to a different archiecture. The recent wave of mobile devices for iOS and Android has shown this to be completely wrong.
In the future DBA's that only know how to use a relational database will be obsolete, because younger developers that know how to use mysql and various nosql solutions will take their jobs.
Goal 1 of the financing was funds to accelerate r&d, to hire engineers to do things like the ones you mention above; in addition more r&d just pushing hard to maximize overall product quality, stability, etc. not sure if those exact things will get done and exactly when yet. I'd definitely like to see the solaris build get some attention. dwight/10gen
a patchset for non-Intel CPU support was around for years, and you guys completely ignored its existence. As well as all the critics towards non-word-aligned data structures and in-memory presentation.
how about redesigning the whole product with all that cash?
berkeley db is not similar, mongodb allows you to store json, and create indexes on many parts of the json, and query on those as well. with berkeley db you have to build that in yourself in the application, not in the database.
$42 million is nice and all, but the real question here is: will it scale? Stay tuned until next week folks when we find out, "IF IT WILL SCALE!" cue crowd cheer
I am surprised Clustrix (YC) hasn't gotten more attention. They rewrite SQL databases and claim to be able to scale them. Maybe the up front cost scares people.
I hope they continue to market MongoDB on its merits and not as some replacement for SQL databases. Both models have their place and there are plenty of use cases where one or the other is more suited.
Yes, we saw, the per-database write lock. It's soooo much better.
Come on, guys. They have real NoSQL datastores out there... with more sophisticated strategies than "keep it all in memory and let the operating system swap everything to disk" to boot.
not sure what you're going on about..
what you're characterizing as "punting" to the OS was a carefully thought through decision, along the same vein as the one phk of FreeBSD and Varnish fame made[1]
Varnish is a carefully tuned piece of machinery that consciously leverages the page cache because that happens to be a great fit for the access pattern that you'd expect in a cache.
Mongo is not a cache. It generates quite a different access pattern and it's widely documented what happens when your working-set exceeds RAM or when you put it under anything but the lightest write-load. A single bulk update literally halts the world.
Comparing Varnish to MongoDB is quite an insult, akin to comparing a Swiss precision Rolex to a plastic Mickey Mouse watch "with many advanced secret-agent features" from a gumball machine.
An apparently they already pay for themselves: "“Business is fantastic,” 10gen President Max Schireson told me. “We keep outperforming every goal that we set for ourselves and the market just feels like it’s huge.” In fact, he said, new sales people pay for themselves almost immediately upon joining the company."
So I wonder what they are going to do with that huge pile of cash? R&D for a single DB surely can't be that expensive (or at least it would be difficult to get that many people to suddenly work on productive things that would actually improve the product and not just make it bloatware).
Apparently the hype works, for a DB that is about scaling but doesn't scale yet? "Just another $100m and we'll get there"?
How many people actually need a DB that "scales" better than mysql/postgres which are much easier to use and better supported and understood?
" Among other things, it has been criticized for being rather difficult to manage at scale. This is somewhat ironic, as scalability, along with the flexibility that comes with being schemaless, is among the driving factors behind the NoSQL movement. One would expect the most-popular of the bunch to scale with ease."