Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

No disrespect whatsoever to MongoHQ, but I'm skeptical that there will ever be a big market for database as a service.

These are all niche, and likely to remain so: - Companies willing to use public cloud; - Companies willing to adopt NoSQL; - Companies willing to move production data outside of their control; - Companies who would rather not manage their production database.

Operating in any one of those niches is challenging, let alone at the intersection of all of them.

View on HN

Public clouds are not a niche service and to say companies will never adopt nosql even as they improve every day is a very strong statement. Companies don't want to manage their databases; they just want uptime, performance and control (which in the past implies direct management), but this is exactly what MongoHQ is offering and why they will succeed.

Theyre all getting traction in certain niches, but 99 out of 100 companies are going to be very skeptical about using something like this and ill wager it will take years for that to change.

Looking at EC2 or a NoSQL solution in isolation maybe, but I know that if i suggested NoSQL database as a service to most of my customers for their production data I would be laughed out of the building.

There's a lot of pressure working in our favor. There's pressure from (increasingly powerful) developers to use specialized DBs to solve specialized problems. There's pressure to do more with less operations people, DBAs in particular since they're exceptionally difficult to hire. And there's pressure to get things running more quickly.

Anyway, we think we're in a pretty good spot. We could be entirely wrong, though.

I think there's a stage where companies can get huge value from using "as a service" products. Sure it's initially more expensive but the risk to your business is the product and market, not really the exact economics.

As you scale you can then start building your own datacenters to decrease your costs, place a higher value on security, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com