Whats MongoDB's business model !? Open source, and separate "enterprise" closed source version !? Are contributors OK with this or are most contributors in-house ? It seems Nginx et.al are also using this business model ... I'm thinking about starting my own open source business.
MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
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Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the HN community is averse to NoSQL solutions, but is averse to MongoDB in particular.
Everyone here seems to love Postgres and hate on Mongo, I have no technical knowledge to compare the two, so IMO a lot of that love and hate is more towards the "project attitude", MongoDB is a suit, a sellout, with bullshit marketing and all Postgres is like some roots hippie, that cares a lot more about technical values and neglects marketing.
MongoDB accrued a lot of bad-will due to some extremely questionable defaults, which remain defaults to this day. There's no question that you can write a fast database when there's no guarantee that data ever hits the disk, but developers tend not to like it when a database accepts their write and then silently loses data. It's also great for toy problems and 15-minute-demos... but then you inevitably run into its limitations and end up re-implementing a database in your app.
Even at its best, there is essentially no reason to choose MongoDB over Postgres with JSONB-type columns. They are essentially the same data model but Postgres gives you better guarantees of data consistency, plus a forward migration path to relational data when the day inevitably arrives when you need to model relationships between entities.
At this point Postgres is where most open-source RDBMS development work is concentrated. It's not only a solid codebase, it's piling up features pretty quickly and there are relatively few niches it doesn't fill at least adequately. All of these niches are covered by some commercial products built on top of Postgres (eg EnterpriseDB or CitusDB). It's pretty much a one-stop shop for application development. You can use it for everything from GIS to machine learning [0] pretty efficiently, and it pretty much will just do the right thing without you watching.
NoSQL really fits best around the margins, like as an auxiliary system for analytics. There is really almost no use-case where "user inputs data and we lose it" is an acceptable application behavior, so consistency is a business requirement for your master database whether you realize it or not. And consistency across a distributed system is hard so it almost always makes sense to sidestep clustering until the last possible moment. Buying more machine is cheap, replication/failover is a lot easier than consistency between distributed masters, and if you are really up against the wall there are those commercial products that can do this with Postgres.
If you want to make an analogy... Oracle is the suit, Postgres is the hardworking small business that is slowly but surely eating up Oracle's lunch, and MongoDB is a trustafarian with a hot-dog detector app. And that's why there's a lot of resentment towards MongoDB.
[0]: The 9.x series and 10.0 release have been absolutely jam-packed with new features, it's absurd how fast development is moving at the moment. One of my favorites... indexed cube queries. A cube is a data-cube type, an N-dimensional cube of data. One feature of this is distance queries, which have obvious applications in pattern recognition tasks (eg k-nearest-neighbor). One of the features in 9.6 is index functionality for these, so you can now do indexed KNN searches on your data...
https://www.depesz.com/2016/01/10/waiting-for-9-6-cube-exten...
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#203MongoDB 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…
After a miniscule run-in with SQL, the only real DB I've ever touched is MongoDB (I've dabbled in redis). I've never understood the hate that MongoDB gets, but that's probably because I primarily use Node as a backend so the object style suits me.
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know there's quite some aversion to NoSQL around here, and generally I don't care much as I'm seldomly dealing directly with databases. But recently, I've been exposed to a fairly big and complex SQL one with several references between entities and lots, lots of X_has_Y tables. This makes me think that with growing complexity (which seems to be a general trend), NoSQL databases seem more practical at some point, or…
i got downvoted in another thread for saying nosql has a lot of advantages in reducing work like not having to worry about carefully creating indexes when joining billion row tables. someone replied you dont need indexes. i replied I dont know how you plan on running joins on billion row tables in postgress without indexes. got downvoted again. I bet they are still waiting for that join....
Whether you need indexes really depends on what you’re trying to do. Full table scans are more efficient if you are doing analytics on most of those rows in a time series. If you need 1 row in a billion, yes, you need an index.
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couchbase has a pretty nice mobile sync system, with clients for both Android and iOS.
The problem I found with couch is handling user permissions at database level. Except for that detail, it's one of the best databases I've ever used.
With the sync gateway you get pretty fine grained control. Every create or update goes through a sync function you can define in JavaScript which can deny requests. You can control which users see what by assigning the document to channels. So a user can only pull down documents if that document is on a channel they have access, too.
The issue I've found with the sync gateway is that the queries you can perform are more limited than what you can do directly on a Couchbase store e.g. joining data is difficult.
BTW, Couchbase should not be confused with CouchDB. Similar name and might have some history in common, but Couchbase is more fully featured.
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#206MongoDB 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…
- "We are better then you are. We have better stuff..."
- "You don't get it, Steve. That doesn't matter!"
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#207> "Most applications today run on a database technology that was introduced in the 1970s," Ittycheria said. "In the '70s, I was using a rotary phone to have a phone conversation. So people are looking for a modern, scalable and flexible platform." It's like a weird version of the Turing test where you have to decide whether someone's speaking seriously or in jest when they talk about NoSQL. https://www.youtube.com/wa…
I know there's quite some aversion to NoSQL around here, and generally I don't care much as I'm seldomly dealing directly with databases. But recently, I've been exposed to a fairly big and complex SQL one with several references between entities and lots, lots of X_has_Y tables. This makes me think that with growing complexity (which seems to be a general trend), NoSQL databases seem more practical at some point, or…
The point is that the relational model is a fully general purpose mathematical model for managing data with integrity and with ad hock access.
Most other models are for high performance of specific access paths and punt integrity management to code, which is a throwback to the 70s. They’re glorified file systems and data structure caches. Mongo has a reputation for losing your data.
There are cases where scale and availability kills you and you need something like Cassandra or whatnot. But there are few as flexible and general as Oracle or Postgres.
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I for one think PostgreSQL is overrated. The number one reason for why people want NoSQL is horizontal scaling and for that PostgreSQL is terrible, with all available solutions being hacks that don't work.
I second this. Mongo clusters are easy to manage, and the aggregation pipeline or MapReduce engines do wonders on a sharded cluster with tons of data. That's the selling point of mongo for me.
That's interesting to me as I've been looking at Mongo aggregations for a solution to a problem but couldn't find any research on the performance of them.
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which NoSQL would you prefer over mongo?
Cassandra is a pretty good alternative if you're looking for excellent write speeds and scalability.
We're using Cassandra at scale (~1M concurrent users at peak). It is, in our experience, an absolutely terrible piece of software.
The development community doesn't seem to care about fixing bugs, and when they do fix things, they reliably introduce new, often devastating defects. "Move fast and break things" is unforgivable at the persistence layer. We're stuck using an ancient, unsupported version, because it is, per our empirical testing, the least bad. But we made that choice, and for now we're stuck with it.
Please, let our pain be a lesson to you. I am totally willing to be someone else's "That's how you get ants..." on this point. Our emoji for it in Slack is a burning poo. It's that bad.
EDIT: phrasing.
Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO
#210I 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.
Presumably the founders didn't sell all their shares.
An IPO that goes up instead of down is much more likely to attract more investment thus driving the founder's remaining shares up.