With $42M more, 10gen wants to take MongoDB mainstream
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
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."
'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)
Easier mapping between my domain model (I mainly use Smalltalk) and the persistence is a huge win.
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
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.
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.
note: be sure to hold it over the sink while 'filling'
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.
The hype is ridiculous. You mean like Oracle DB is a "household name"? No, I didn't think so.
...or they could just wait for the next generation of young developers to take leadership roles at BigCorp.
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.
how about redesigning the whole product with all that cash?
It's different from a product like MongoDB et al which support far richer data models.
Plus, I think they have the single-server-database-that-doesn't-scale-easily market covered.
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.
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.
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.