MongoDB to acquire open-source mobile database Realm for $39M

We (Remind) have been using Realm for a few years now. It's been great at what it does, but we've started to depend on it less.

One of the issues we found was that Realm works really well with REST / entity based APIs. You fetch the data, shove it in realm, and the screen updates. However, we've been moving more towards a screen based API using Graphql. We have a lot more partial entities that we fetch (Eg. A particular screen might only need user names rather than full user entities), and while we made it work with Realm we felt some pain around it.

We still use it for a lot of stuff, but it's not quite as central to our app as it was before. It's a useful database and we use it for all the database things in our app (caching and stuff) but the elegance of UI<=>Realm and Realm<=>Server has broken down a bit.

Good for the founders, though with the purchase by Mongo, I will mourn when the Realm database system stops being open source.

MongoDB is such a great company with great products. Acquiring Realm will make it more enterprise and cloud friendly.

Realm is an alternative to SQLite and ORM libraries from the looks of things.

It sounds like an interesting technology. Why didn’t it take off?