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Comment by bmcahren | Hacker News Reader

I feel Amazon took the feedback from the DocumentDB/MongoDB fiasco to heart and made positive change in their approach.

DocumentDB is a closed source proprietary database created by Amazon to emulate the MongoDB API. Think Google's Dalvik runtime vs Sun/Oracle's JVM.

This time around we have an open source fork of ES with big backers all contributing and very permissive licensing.

In both cases, Amazon gets to implement AWS-specific upgrades to management to depend heavily on EBS replication rather than application-layer replication. Would it be nice to have that secret sauce that makes Aurora/DocumentDB so nice to use compared to self-hosting or RDS? Of course. Do we have to have it to consider using or contributing to the open source software? No.

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On the other hand, MongoDB is already sort of obsolete and trending towards death by the time that all ended up happening while ElasticSearch is hot and "new".

Where do you get the impression MongoDB is trending towards death? Seems to be growing by some metrics; the stock price has more than doubled in the last year. Not a fan myself, but still seems a long way from death to me and seem to be doing something right in enterprise market.

There's a difference between trending towards death and dead.

IBM has been trending towards death for decades now and it's nowhere near dead.

MongoDB is certainly on the road to death, IMO. As has Oracle DBMS since the 90s.

Most companies tend to make more money as their product's growth stalls out (extracting more money from existing customers).

The fact that Mongo had to create shitty-license underpins huge revenue problems. If you look at the major trends and surveys, the ones targeted at people who actually drive database adoption within companies, MongoDB is sliding YoY for 3 years now.

The place you see Mongo growing is Atlas. Yes, as their competitors can no longer offer MongoDB in their clouds, revenue shifts to MongoDB. That does not mean that use of the database itself is growing.

What surveys are you referring to? Got any sources?

the yearly Stack Overflow survey, for one.

Find me a bunch of developers and infrastructure people who are EXCITED about running MongoDB. I guarantee you're going to find a 7-10+ year old infrastructure if you do.

This just isn't true. A large number of companies are building new applications with MongoDB atlas

Yes, because Mongo's license prevents them from using alternatives to Atlas (read: other cloud providers). Of course Atlas growth looks good. It's them or self-hosting.

That's not the same as starting a new product on MongoDB.

Pretty misleading when it leads the most wanted category in that very survey (maybe you're thinking of what people report already using) https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...

MongoDB is not trending towards death and is actually still growing by almost any metric.

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

I like to check this site every couple months for stats on DB popularity

Ugh, no MS Excel /s

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