Eliot Horowitz is CTO and co-founder of MongoDB. He provides an update on MongoDB's current company head count during a fireside chat at Data Driven NYC.
Opinion
Horowitz admits MongoDB is a "pretty terrible" relational database
“Now, MongoDB is definitely not a good relational database. It's a pretty terrible relational database, but we're moving in the, in that way where you can start taking some of these workloads and putting them more into a fewer, a few different products.”
Assertion Partly supported
MongoDB's AGPL license prevented AWS from offering it as a managed service
“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 t…”
Assertion Supported
WiredTiger storage engine made MongoDB ten times faster in version 3.0
“Wiretiger was not a little bit better than the previous storage engine. It really was a complete leapfrog. It was, you know, 10 times faster.”
Insight
Horowitz: Pseudo-SQL NoSQL languages fail to support standard SQL-compliant tools
“The challenge with a lot of these SQL-like languages is they don't really let you use SQL-compliant tools, so you can't use your Tableau directly with it because it doesn't speak sort of standard SQL”
Disclosure
Horowitz: 85% of MongoDB's engineering team is based in New York
“So most, about 85% of our engineering is based in New York, you know, in Times Square, 10 blocks away from here.”
Insight
Horowitz: Relational databases function like Microsoft Excel on steroids
“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…”