The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Turck says vector database viability depends on incumbent database feature parity
“Do you really need a, you know, a specialized database to do that? Or in a context where some of the more general purpose players like the MongoDBs of the world have started announcing vector capabilities, you know, is that good enough? The answer to that ques…”
Eifrem: Only 5 modern NoSQL database companies have crossed $100M ARR
“There's five database companies that have crossed a hundred million, right, of the, kind of the, let's call it the NoSQL crowd, or like modern operational database companies. It's, You know, Mongo, and then it's us and Redis. We're on that kind of Mongo path. …”
MongoDB replaced six C-level executives in the three years post-IPO
“It's a, it's not a secret, but since we've gone public three and a half years ago, we've had six C-level changes, right?”
Volpi: AWS launched DocumentDB to bypass MongoDB's SSPL license
“Mongo took an interesting similar approach. They have something called SSPL. In that case, it says you can take it, but any software that you build around it to run it, you have to open source it. So Amazon will have to open source its entire software base use…”
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.”
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…”
Van Luijt: MongoDB is late to the vector database market
“It's great that they've seen the light too. It's a bit late though, but it's like a, you know, good for them.”
MongoDB spent over $700M on R&D, dedicating half to free software
“We've invested over seven hundred million in R&D since we started the company, and more than 50% of that goes with the free product.”
Kulkarni: TimescaleDB delivers query speeds 100x-1000x faster than MongoDB
“Given the same hardware, we're seeing not just higher insert performance, but hundreds to thousands of times faster queries.”
Kulkarni: Elastic filed for IPO making $160M in revenue, more than MongoDB
“I think Elastic, which is Filed Furnace for a IPO, is an example of that. I think they're already making a hundred and sixty million In revenue, which is more than Mongo's making already, which is crazy.”
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.”
Justin Borgman: MongoDB is built for web applications, not data analytics
“MongoDB, for example, is purely complementary to what we do. You wouldn't use Mongo for analytics, really, and you wouldn't use us for, You know, keeping your webpage running, for example.”
Eric Frenkiel criticizes MongoDB for relying on a global write lock
“Mongo also has a global write lock. So one writer will block everyone else until it completes.”
Merriman: Fast distributed transactions across hundreds of commodity servers are impossible
“If we have a thousand server cluster running on commodity hardware, on a commodity network, and you want to touch data and mutate it that's on 600 servers, and then you want to commit that all or nothing with isolation and option to roll it back, and you want …”
Merriman: HBase is more directly competitive with MongoDB than Hadoop
“I think Hadoop, or HBase, which is a Hadoop subproject, that's more of a, that's something that's more of an alternative or competitive with Mongo, where you would look at A versus B”
Delangue: AI will create open-source commercial giants like Red Hat and MongoDB
“And I would expect there to be even more in AI. We'll have kind of like the MongoDB, the Elastic, the Red Hat of AI, which are going to be like open source AI, AI companies.”
Multi-level graph queries are extremely hard to run in MongoDB or SQL
“So this type of query in a relational database or something like MongoDB is going to be very hard to run. You've got a lot of joins and you've got very complicated queries.”
MongoDB Atlas hit $350M run rate with 66 percent annualized growth
“So it went from zero To a three hundred fifty million dollar run rate business, you know, when we announced our last quarter's earnings. And it's growing at about a 66% annualized growth rate.”
Dev Ittycheria hired MongoDB's first CRO and CMO on West Coast
“In the early days when I joined actually my first CRO, my first CMO were actually on the West coast because I couldn't find enough depth and experience in New York city.”
MongoDB had more software downloads in 2020 than its first decade combined
“Last year we had more downloads of our software than in the first 10 years of the company's history.”
MongoDB grew from $30M to $700M run rate under Dev Ittycheria
“The business would then was roughly about 250 people trailing about 30 plus million in revenue, and today we're approaching 4000 people and about seven hundred million dollars in run rate.”
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.”
Horowitz: Many database customers want to be cloud-agnostic
“A lot of people we talk to want to be cloud agnostic, right? They want to have a service that lets them run wherever they are.”
Horowitz: MongoDB does not plan to invest in a SQL-like query language
“We have not invested in, we don't really plan on investing in sort of a SQL-like language, because we, you know, I think SQL by itself is very useful, and then you sort of want the best possible language for developers to work with.”
Horowitz: MongoDB's key innovation was enabling indexing and searching inside documents
“The key thing that we did is, you know, you can always just store everything about a person in a single cell in a relational database. The thing that we did that was interesting was let you actually index on it and search on it and modify it in sort of very sm…”
MongoDB security architecture enables enterprise application integration and data lineage
“Mongo has this amazing security architecture now that your applications can plug into, propagate that user information all the way up to the application layer, and enforce, you know, this visualization and the data lineage associated with it along the way.”
Merriman: MongoDB only supports single-document ACID transactions
“What we do currently in Mongo is we do these little microtransactions, which sort of, say, give you ACID properties, but only on a single document at a time, right? Because a single JSON document lives on one and only shard in a Mongo cluster at a given point …”
Merriman: NoSQL databases omit distributed joins to enable horizontal scaling
“Distributed joins is a hard problem, so the solution that's been chosen by both us with Mongo and the other NoSQL products is to say, you know, we're not going to do joins”
MongoDB achieved 99 percent of its growth organically without acquisitions
“99% of our growth has been organic, and the market's very big, so we really focused on organic growth versus, like, trying to grow through acquisition.”
MongoDB holds just 1 percent of the massive enterprise database market
“Going after the database market is one of the largest markets enterprise software. And so, as I said, we only have one percent share, and I think we're doing quite well.”
Horowitz: MongoDB 3.2 introduced join support via $lookup operator
“In three, two, we added a join operator. We call it dollar lookup, but it's fundamentally the same thing as a join, to sort of let you do some of the workloads you would take from a relational database.”
SourceForge ported its entire platform to MongoDB prior to version 1.0
“About four months after we launched 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.”
Horowitz: MongoDB has grown to around 550 employees in 2016
“The employees are about 550 employees now this year.”
Horowitz discovered SourceForge's 2009 database migration through a blog post
“So, we learned about it from their blog post, and we were very worried that it was not gonna work. Yeah, it was completely, we had no idea. We had not talked to any of them before it launched.”
MongoDB acquired storage engine startup WiredTiger in fall 2014
“So we ended up acquiring them in the fall of 2014, and then that became the storage engine for MongoDB in three point oh, last March.”
Horowitz: MongoDB saw a huge amount of Azure adoption over the past year
“What we see is a lot of, ah, a huge amount of Azure adoption in the last year.”
Rent the Runway's 2014 open source stack: MySQL, Mongo, Redis, and R
“Our entire transactional stuff is, is, is on MySQL. We use Mongo for a product catalog. We use Redis to serve recommendations. We use R to do the matrix factorization. Should I touch everything? I think I did. We use tons of Python scripts for parsing the revi…”
Wilson: USV thesis targets developer platforms like Twilio and MongoDB
“We have started to have a thesis around platforms that developers build on top of. Twilio SIF Science Firebase, and MongoDB. So we do like to invest in platforms for developers.”
Merriman: MongoDB's name is derived from the word 'humongous'
“Right, so the name is the middle of the word humongous, so it was kind of a play on this concept of scale, right, so that's where the name came from.”
Merriman: MongoDB 2.2 eliminates global read-write lock to improve concurrency
“Historically in Mongo, sort of the concurrency in a single MongoD process on a single server has been suboptimal. And, ah, between servers it's been good, but inside a single server it needed a lot of work. So there was a global reader-irelock, which has been …”
MongoDB launched its standalone database in 2009 after pivoting from PaaS
“We were, ah, eight people at that point, and we realized that This was way too big of a space for us to take on, and decided that the database was the most interesting part of the platform, and so then in February of 2009 was the first version of MongoDB that …”