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MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

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Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#61
post #26
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Mongo is better than it's ever been. They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. That said, it's pretty hard to make sense of when you would want non-relational dbms these days, especially in an era where you can get 100core systems in AWS/GCP. Write-scaling is still a pretty obvious reason, though things like Citus might help here.

They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. With non-default settings[0]. The Jepsen tests passed with the "linearizable" read concern. The default read concern is "local", which "Provides no guarantee that the data has been written to a majority of the replica set members (i.e. may be rolled back)."[1] This is like having "READ UNCOMMITTED" be the default read level in a traditional database system. The…

These kind of default settings make sense, though. If you really care about lineair writes, you know how to configure it.

Same goes for example for PostgreSQL [1], that uses Read Committed rather than Serializable transaction isolation by default because for the majority of the people, this is fine, and the performance tradeoffs are worth it.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/transaction-iso.h...

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#62
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, it's pretty hard to make sense of when you would want non-relational dbms these days. Write-scaling is still a pretty obvious reason, though things like Citus might help here. Personally, I find a non-relational database useful when my data model is non-relational.

What is an example of non-relational data? A tree is relational. Each child has a relation to its parent. I can't imagine data that has no relation (no connection) to anything else. Maybe what you meant was heterogeneous (e.g. data elements that do not all have the same attributes) - but even then I can't readily come up with an example.

Word "relational" in relational databases does not stand for relationships between the tables [0]. That being said, relational model is a great fit for plenty (most?) of the data.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relation_(database)

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when you poison mindshare. For example, I used Mongo back in the early days. Was terrible. I will now never use it again. I don't care if it shoots lasers. It is dead to me. Obviously the happy developer count is way more than the hate it for life count, so I am the odd man out here. Perhaps many users never actually had many GB of data or had to deal with the data loss side of things?

[apparently my opinion is unwanted]

Let's tone down the drama a little; I am willing to bet there aren't many people at all who would literally choose to lose their home versus work with a technology they don't like (even if for valid reasons, and even if those reasons include data loss or other catastrophes).

If my boss tells me to use MongoDB tomorrow or live on the street despite my advice to the contrary, I will use MongoDB happily. I may look for a new job in my free time if using MongoDB makes me miserable, but I certainly won't be living on the street...

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#64

Is it me..or does Mongo not seem as relevent and 'hip' as it once was... I mean I feel postgres is much more solid, and you can combine some of the aspects of document store via the json data types they added... of course I'm not really a DBA and don't have a lot of Mongo experience ... but personally I feel rdbms make more sense for growth/scaling..

RDBMS makes sense for most applications. Most applications store data that can be fit to the relational model. Most applications aren't big data or data mining OLAP. Most RDBMSs can do key-value stores very well now. Most applications also care more about consistency over availability, which is what RDBMSs do (CAP theorem). Many NoSQL data stores choose availability and partitioning and sacrifice consistency (i.e., "…

You don't seem to know this, but no traditional RDBMSs actually provide CAP consistency, for that they would have to use at least two-phase commit or something, but they don't. So, they all are noCAP databases. Electronic health or financial records are way safer in a proper eventually consistent database, like orders of magnitude safer, but everyone just takes the risk with some insurance at best to cover the losses.

EDIT: If you downvote, please explain why. You can't disagree with the truth.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#65

MongoDB isn't usually seen favorably but everyone must admit that it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration. Think about it. Bringing a database to the market with a completely different paradigm, growing it to the enterprise-production-ready level, and creating a billion-dollar business around is no small deal. Yes, they did ride the NoSQL zeitgeist but they survived when others had no major success. U…

If they had done so by presenting a product that was picked up due to it's merit and continued to gain traction based on that then I'd be rather impressed. Instead the story of MongoDB seems to be how extremely well targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO, there have been performance comparisons showing it isn't even the best at what it does so this IPO is riding on the network effect of those early stages of marketing alone.

In our economy this is sadly an entirely valid route to making money but their mindshare is going to continue to collapse as the warts on their product show more and more.

So the admiration you have should probably be directed at the wool the marketers behind MongoDB managed to pull over your eyes.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#66

Is it me..or does Mongo not seem as relevent and 'hip' as it once was... I mean I feel postgres is much more solid, and you can combine some of the aspects of document store via the json data types they added... of course I'm not really a DBA and don't have a lot of Mongo experience ... but personally I feel rdbms make more sense for growth/scaling..

Postgres is actually much less solid, it's a database from the different era and doesn't come close to any post-CAP database, even to the infamous Mongodb.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#67

I don't understand why everyone is so happy when IPOs go up and make it sound like a good event. I see it as the founders needlessly missing out on 30% of money (in this case), which ends up going in the pockets of the Wall Street middle men that get first access to the stock offering.

Well, the founders’ shares are usually locked up for months after the IPO, right? More like the VC investors and company missed out on some of their money (which is less than 30% for a 30% rise)

Didn't Zuckerberg immediately issue a lot more shares and instantly sell them at the IPO?

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[apparently my opinion is unwanted]

Let's tone down the drama a little; I am willing to bet there aren't many people at all who would literally choose to lose their home versus work with a technology they don't like (even if for valid reasons, and even if those reasons include data loss or other catastrophes). If my boss tells me to use MongoDB tomorrow or live on the street despite my advice to the contrary, I will use MongoDB happily. I may look for…

[or maybe the fact I watched a hundred million $ startup go down the drain in part due to bad engineering choices, of which Mongo was one, doesn’t entitle me to a negative opinion of Mongo]

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#69
post #33

->"MongoDB was the database that most software developers said they wanted to work with, according to StackOverflow's survey of 64,000 developers." Does this just seem like it can't be true? Does anyone know where or why this would be the case?

A lot of the bootcamp schools use mongo from what I remember. An interesting comparison would be what devs with 5+ years of experience prefer to use.

That's not "software developers", though. And how many people would that actually be, not most I'd think...

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#70
post #65

MongoDB isn't usually seen favorably but everyone must admit that it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration. Think about it. Bringing a database to the market with a completely different paradigm, growing it to the enterprise-production-ready level, and creating a billion-dollar business around is no small deal. Yes, they did ride the NoSQL zeitgeist but they survived when others had no major success. U…

If they had done so by presenting a product that was picked up due to it's merit and continued to gain traction based on that then I'd be rather impressed. Instead the story of MongoDB seems to be how extremely well targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO, there have been performance comparisons showing it isn't even the best at what it does so this IPO is riding on the network effect o…

>how extremely well targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO

Thats how most products succeed if you ask me.

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