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Comment by schnebbau | Hacker News Reader

How does MongoDB still have that much available to spend? Everyone I know moved off it years ago.

We use it a lot for a specific use-case and it works great. Mongo has come a long long way since the release over a decade ago, and if you keep it in Majority Read and Write, it's very reliable.

Also, on some things, it allows us to pivot much faster. And now with the help of LLMs, writing "Aggregation Pipelines" are very fast.

I've been using Mongo while developing some analysis / retrieval systems around video, and this is the correct answer. Aggregation pipelines allow me to do really powerful search around amorphous / changing data. Adding a way to automatically update / recalculate embeddings to your database makes even more sense.

Do you have any tricks for writing and debugging pipelines? I feel like there are so many little hiccups that I spend ages figuring out if that one field name needs a $ or not.

Pretending a pile of json is a database is great for pivoting, not so great for anything else.

Maintaining apps built on MongoDB is soul killing.

This

Pretty sure they achieved fiscal nirvana by exploiting enterprise brain rot. You hook em, they accumulate tech debt for years, all their devs leave, now they can't move away & you can start increasing prices. Eventually the empty husk will topple over but that's still years away.

Is it possible that they simply have a good product?

Impossible! It's not based on sqlite, postgres or written in rust, so it must be terrible!

I never understood this argument, there are many great products running on Java, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript... All of these languages have a "crowd" that hates them for historic and/or esoteric reasons.

Great products are in my opinion a function of skill and care. The only benefit a "popular" tool or language gets you is a greater developer pool for hiring.

They do have a good product, but "they accumulate tech debt for years, all their devs leave, now they can't move away" is the story of the place I worked at a few years ago. The database was such a disorganized, inconsistent mess that no-one had the stomach (or budget) to try and get off it.

Basically every MongoDB I've come across; same story, different faces.

This is maybe the biggest reason to have a RDBMS, enforcing discipline to keep your data clean. Ultimately this trumps almost everything else.

These days almost all the alternatives do 90% of what they cover in a way that’s either using your pre-existing tech stack, or just net-better.

There’s probably some extremely specific niche use-cases where it works well, but I suspect they’re pretty few-and-far-between.

Then they get acquired by BloodMoor and they squeeze every last cent out of the remaining customers.

Unironically, this.

that’s what I thought, but every single candidate I interviewed mentioned MongoDB as their recent reference document database, I asked the last candidate if they were self-hosting, the answer is no, they used MongoDB cloud.

I self host a handful of mongodb deployments for personal projects and manage self hosted mongo deployments of almost a hundred nodes for some companies. Atlas can get very expensive if you need good IO.

if you a developer you wanna use MongoDB as database, not be MongoDB SRE and DBA

thats the reason for using Atlas

Precisely, and if you are enterprise, you want to have an option to request priority support and have a lot of features out of the box. Also some of the search features are only available in Atlas unfortunately.

You cant use the embeddings/vector search stuff this refers to in self hosted anyway, it’s only implemented in their Atlas Cloud product. It makes it a real PITA to test locally. The Atlas Dev local container didn’t work the same when I tried it earlier in the year.

Atlas has a generous free tier that is great for hobby projects.

Everyone you know put a dollar in donation basket while moving off. Mongo collected all and brought Voyage AI

$2.3B in cash as of last quarter

Because they are web-scale obviously.

Well, it's referred to as a cash-and-stock deal but I can't find any more detail about how much is stock:

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4412466-mongodb-acquires-voyag...

MongoDB is a public company. Its quarterly financial reports will give you a much more accurate picture of the company's health than "everyone you know".

There are a lot of people still on it, including the place I worked at last.

It was starting to get expensive though, so we were experimenting with other document stores (dynamodb was being trialled, since we were already AWS for most things, just around the time I left)

Are they profitable, and at which point in time? How good of an investment was it? Sorry, my eyes were swimming in their financial report hosted in their domain.

Mongo Atlas (their cloud offering) is really solid (and expensive)!

This may be a shock to many HN readers, but MongoDB's revenue has been growing quite fast in the last few years (from 400M in 2020 to 1.7B in 2024). They've been pushing Atlas pretty hard in the Enterprise world. Have no experience with it myself, but I've heard some decently positive things about it (ease of set up and maintenance, reliability).

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