The Exchanges

Q the NoSQL, uh, world, so there was this, um, term, uh, that was, uh, polyglot persistence, which was this concept of, hey, it's great if you have multiple use cases, and you should use different databases for each one of those use cases, um, And I mean, it seems that people are starting to evolve away from this. Is that, is that how you think about the world as well?

A Uh, it is. I think it's less of an evolution away from it. I think if you look back 10 years, people were sort of struggling with lots of different problems, and it was very easy and sort of very pragmatic to find a product that solved a problem. Like, I need to scale this service. I need to scale this application. I need to do something. And I don't want to, like, choose a platform for the next 10 years, because frankly none of them are ready for that. So just find, you know, get me a product that solves a problem, gets me out of my current situation. And so that's what people did. So they had their big relational database, that was sort of their standard thing, and they tried some new database in order to sort of solve a problem. As all of these things have matured, as MongoDB has matured, it can solve more and more problems, and no one I ever talk to wants to have 15 different databases in production. It's just not good for anyone. It's not efficient, it's not easy to manage, it's very frustrating for people internally. They don't want to have one, but they want to have, they want to have a handful of databases. And it really comes down to is how you store the data, and what kinds of things you can do with it. And so in MongoDB's case, the thing that, you know, one of the things that I love about the document model, is the document model really, in many ways, can be a supers…

AI assessment note: “Uh, it is. I think it's less of an evolution away from it.”

Q And it's an open source product, right? So how do you, how did you start an open source project? How did you get a community to start Contributing.

A Well, the great thing about open source is that it's sort of, it's almost self-fulfilling. You should get it out there, and, you know, initially it was really just, you know, talking at events like this, blogging as much as we could, talking to our friends, you know, frankly, you know, talking to friends, and friends of friends, and just getting them to try it. The nice thing about MongoDB was that it was compelling enough, even in sort of its very first early incarnations, that people sort of saw promise, right? It wasn't very good, it didn't have a lot of features, it didn't do very much at that point, but people were really compelled, like, wow, this could actually be really interesting. And so they tried it, and so the word spread very rapidly. And once that happened, being open source, people could download it, try it, play with it. No barriers to entry, so people just got hooked pretty quickly. You know, about four months after we launched, um, SourceForge decided to port their entire platform to MongoDB, which was sort of a crazy move. I mean, this was in 2009, so it's been a while. But they ported the entire platform to MongoDB prior to MongoDB one point oh. And that was one of the big instigators of people sort of like, wow, this is, uh, this is pretty interesting. That was actually before the term NoSQL, I believe, by about a month or two.

AI assessment note: “initially it was really just, you know, talking at events like this, blogging as much”

Q well, speaking of NoSQL, so we have, um, we have a broad audience here, we have a bunch of people who presumably live in Mongo and are technical, and, and we also have people who are more on the business side, so let's start at a, at a fairly high level, um, help, uh, us understand What is a NoSQL database, the evolution, how that's different from a SQL database?

A So, NoSQL database is really a sort of one of the, ah, the words that I don't like to use, because it really doesn't tell you much about what it is. So SQL's been around for a long time. It was designed for some very specific use cases, and is incredibly good for those use cases. So NoSQL sort of has become this category of things that aren't that, and there's a lot of different things in that space, and especially over the last, you know, eight years, you've seen a lot of different kinds of things come out, and a lot of different people trying different things. So, you know, if you think about MongoDB, and why MongoDB is interesting to people, compared to a relational database, you know, the simplest example I use is, you know, a relational database is basically like Microsoft Excel on steroids. If you take Microsoft Excel, and you've got tables and rows, and you've got, you know, columns, and it's kind of like a relational database, but what a relational database does is give you an incredibly powerful platform to work with big Excel spreadsheets in a way that Excel never could. It gives you programmatic APIs to them, it gives you scalability, it gives you all these great things. The problem is that, you know, in the real world, trying to model data and putting everything into an Excel spreadsheet is pretty complicated. If you're trying to sort information about, you know, a …

AI assessment note: “NoSQL sort of has become this category of things that aren't that”

Q Okay. And the last part of that convergence is, uh, possibly, you know, databases and analytics, uh, which sort of happened a little bit in the Hadoop world. Um, did you see that happening as well?

A Yeah, so that we see a lot more of. So we see a lot of people who have data, data in MongoDB, Not wanting to put it into a separate analytics database, and wanting to do queries on that. You know, a lot of this is really predicated on one, migrating data and synchronizing multiple data stores is, is complicated and complex, and often you need twice as much hardware, and also the fact that people don't want, want reporting that's 24 hours delayed. People want reports and analytics that are in real time. And so we do a lot of work to make that work very well. So you can actually have reports in MongoDB, but you can have them hit nodes that are dedicated for analytics so that there's, you know, no lag, On your production system, but at the same time you're getting real time results for your, all of your analytics queries.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so that we see a lot more of.”

Q of this, and the business of, of open source. So it seems that Mongo has done an incredible, uh, job at, uh, conquering the, uh, the, the developer, uh, uh, crowd, and the question's always, uh, you know, how do you go from developers to, um, mission critical, enterprise wide deployments? Where, where are you guys on that arc, and how do you think about that from a strategic standpoint?

A Uh, so I think, certainly think about it a lot. You know, I think, You know, a typical way MongoDB moves into enterprise is you get some developer who tries it out for some small application, maybe it's a logging application or something on the side, that if it goes down, you know, it doesn't matter at all. That works well for a little while, he convinces his boss to try it for something a little bit bigger, not quite mission critical, but kind of important, then it goes into sort of like a tier two application that's mission critical, but not the most important, and then if that goes well, then it sort of gets greenlit to go into like a mission critical application, And then if that works well, and then it becomes sort of a standard across an enterprise. That is sort of the very typical way MongoDB enters big companies. And, you know, it's obviously very varied, but in a lot of companies, we're sort of past that stage where we are sort of the data platform for a lot of mission critical applications. And in other enterprises, we're sort of at the very beginning. So it's, it really covers the full gamut. And a lot of it depends on what they need in terms of security features, in terms of when they started using it. You know, no big company that I know of is ever going to adopt something like MongoDB and day one put it in a mission critical use case. Um, it's just, you know, I wo…

AI assessment note: “in a lot of companies, we're sort of past that stage where we are”

Q about the, the, the cloud, what do you think about the, about Amazon as, uh, you know, a company that has displayed a, a, um, a little bit of a tendency to take open source projects and offer them as a service, um, separately from the host of the, or the company that, that is behind the open source project. Is that, is that, uh, something you guys worry about?

A Um, so they do this a lot, so for those who don't know, so for example, Amazon has a product called RDS, which is Relational Database Service, and in that they have managed MySQL, managed MariaDB, managed Postgres, even managed Oracle and managed SQL Server. They did this for Elasticsearch a little while ago. So in MongoDB it's a little different. We've got a slightly different license. It's an open source license, it's a free software foundation approved license, but it's the AGPL, and the AGPL gives us a little bit more advantage than other players, so Amazon can't quite do the same thing that they can with, ah, MySQL as they can with, so they can't do the same thing with Mongo as they can do with MySQL. So we're in a little bit, ah, in a better position. And that's why we can sort of have these management tools that work with Amazon very carefully, And we sort of integrate with Amazon, so if you want to use Amazon and MongoDB, you can go ahead and go to Cloud Manager today, put in your credentials, and we will just spin stuff up in your Amazon account for you, and we'll manage it for you, but you have to come to us. You know, I think Amazon is, uh, you know, moving impressively fast in the cloud space, and I think they're sort of really changing the game there, but, and I think that, you know, what we see is a lot of, ah, a huge amount of Azure adoption in the last year. See…

AI assessment note: “the AGPL gives us a little bit more advantage than other players”