Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 425 posts

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

#111

Post by karmelapple »

thawkins wrote: post #77
flavio81 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration Well, it's a success story due to marketing, smart marketing, clever marketing, and more marketing, not due to lots of technical merits. And it was not the first document store to appear, just the most successful. For starters, CouchDB was previous to MongoDB.

Couch was a nightmare to use, mingo made all the friction to get it into products go away, especialy when teamed with dynamic languages.

Using CouchDB on our team has been a pretty good experience; nothing like a nightmare.

We used replication on the native apps for offline mode, kept things simpler with online-only for our web app, and have had a very good time overall.

We are also using JSON schema for our CouchDB documents so we ensure we don't have all kinds of wild / wrong data showing up; if you had really hairy, unstructured data, I can see why a dynamic language might help with that bad situation, but for our use case, we were able to take advantage of the powerful replication built into CouchDB and get solid offline syncing for all of our native apps that also plays nicely with live updates in a web browser.

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

zzzcpan wrote: post #99
toomuchtodo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In certain environments, it is better to fail then to have data that isn't immediately consistent. Finance and healthcare are two such systems. Availability is not always paramount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_transaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomicity_(database_systems)

They only guarantee consistency as long as you don't use them over a network, i.e. communications with the database are always reliable. But once you do use them over a network - CAP theorem comes in and forces you to either use something like two-phase commit or no promises of consistency. Which is the opposite of what his post implied, like there is CAP consistency with those databases. But there never was! Althoug…

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by takeda »

munk-a wrote: post #65
shubhamjain wrote: post #22

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…

Even minor things like picking a product name had impact. They also implemented most desirable features (the gotcha was that they were half assed, but if your evaluation was also half assed as is usually done you won't notice it)

I actually chose it back in 2010 project and on paper MongoDB looked better than other databases. MongoDB name as they mentioned originates from Humongous Database giving false impression that it can scale well.

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

#114

Post by yeukhon »

sametmax wrote: post #92
adamnemecek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easy to reason about. ...until it's not. Then it's really not.

But how many people reach this stage ?

It starts really early on. When I first used MongoDB I thought to myself "what a fresh breath, I can finally ignore normalization!" The documents I inserted would contain all the information I needed. One retrieval and I got what I needed. Wow!! But then I started doing sorting, searching and I had to do most of the work on the client side (my backend). At that point, I found myself in trouble because in my other tables I also dup my information. Data has to be updated in multiple places. So I thought "let's take out the dup data." Then I found myself not knowing how to structure my document data anymore... back to some sort of normalization. At the time the searching and ranking in MongoDB were also poor, so I was forced to doing the entire thing on the client side regardless.

I went back to PostgreSQL since. I probably needed a good one-on-one expert training with MongoDB, but I just found myself happier with RDBMS. You don't have to be strict normalization in RDBMS, just enough to make sense for your use cases.

One thing I really did like about MongoDB back then was storing blob (files). It was the best solution available without setting up S3. At the time there was a limitation with 4GB (??) but MongoDB worked for my use case anyway. That being said, please don't store files in any databases today. Use DB to store references to a real object storage like S3. When the DB crashed, you better hope no corruption.

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

#115

Post by gangstead »

jc_811 wrote: 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?

Maybe they just surveyed bootcamp attendees.

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

#116

Post by pja »

capkutay wrote: post #110
munk-a wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did MongoDB go to market differently than the other enterprise NoSQL DBs (MarkLogic, DataStax)?

I’m told they absolutely flooded tech meetups in the SV area and with advertorial talks - talks on NoSQL (that just happened to use MongoDB of course), lots of FUD about SQL vs. NoSQL etc etc.

I’ve no idea to what extent this was true, or if it was whether it was their main marketing approach, but it might have been quite an effective strategy: talks at meetups are often 'trusted' to a greater extent than other ways of reaching devs & if you can find a new generation of devs who are just starting out and hook them on your product before they get the chance to explore other approaches then it could work. High cost of course (someone has to pay for all that time) but if it gets you a leg up on your competitors in a $billion business then that’s what the VC money is for...

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

#117

Post by noncoml »

jameskilton wrote: post #82
munk-a wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, right, like RethinkDB? As much as I'd love this to be true, the #1 measure of success is if people even know you exist and #2 is if you solve enough of a customer's problems that it's worth using your product. MongoDB hit these two points hard right out of the gate and are now very successful because of it.

MongoDBs clients are much more simple to use than that of RethinkDB. Imho that was the number one reason it didn’t gain traction.

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

#118

Post by threeseed »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #58
shubhamjain wrote: post #22

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…

> Bringing a database to the market with a completely different paradigm, growing it to the enterprise-production-ready level Neither of those are true, however.

It was the first, well known, company supported JSON document store.

It is being used by Facebook, Metlife, Expedia, Sony, eBay, Adobe etc.

In what way isn't it ready for production use cases ?

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

#119

Post by jjnoakes »

jsjohnst wrote: post #80
jjnoakes wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say you'd choose to be homeless all you want, but saying "many" would do the same I think is being a little too dramatic. And quitting your job (as you now point out, but didn't originally) is much different from "choosing to be homeless".

I used the word quit in my very first post on this thread in a way that should’ve been obvious I meant quit my job .

It wasn't the word "quit" that was being objected to though; it was your equating quitting to being homeless (in the very same first post in this thread) and then further saying you think many others would also rather quit and be homeless than work with MongoDB.

That's a bit too dramatic.

Next time, just say "I'd rather quit than work with MongoDB again", and you won't have this problem.

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

#120

Post by jartelt »

Per crunchbase they raised their last funding round on a pre-money valuation of $1.6 billion. Since the market cap now is less than that valuation, why is the coverage saying this is a big success? It seems to me like this is a down round of some sort. Does anyone know if I am missing something here? Or does this type of down round not really affect the employees common stock?
Post reply on HN