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

321–330 of 425 posts

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

#321

Post by rareattention »

enjo wrote: post #27
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…

It really is an interesting story. They aren't best in class in any of the metrics we think of as mattering. It's not the highest scale system out there. It's not the most durable. Or the most available. Hell it's not even particularly reliable (at least throughout its history). It is however..simple. Very simple. It's easy to reason about. It's easy to setup. For 90% of use cases it's very easy to administer. It tur…

>They aren't best in class in any of the metrics we think of as mattering.

MongoDB is the best in class at how programmer-friendly it is. Its API is easy to work with. This is especially the case if you are using node and javascript.

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

#322

Post by dx034 »

mathattack wrote: post #315

Interesting valuation. 8x revenue is a success for SaaS companies. They were initially priced at $20/share, which would imply ~9.5x revenue. At $32/share they're at ~16x revenue. Very steep. They also fail the VC "rule of 40" where SaaS companies should have growth plus margins equal to 40%. (50% growth and negative 10% margins, or 10% growth and 30% margins) They seem to be at 50% growth, but minus 40% margins. Some…

For non-tech people, MongoDB often represents areas such as "big data". I work with a lot of people that have very little tech knowledge and the name comes up frequently to demonstrate that you're hip. It's the same that being on AWS convinces investors because running your own servers is so yesterday.

Only Hadoop probably has an even bigger name. That's what everyone connects with machine learning and AI, so every big company needs a Hadoop cluster.

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

#323

Post by gaius »

growse wrote: post #142
hungerstrike wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any data can be modelled in a relational way, I guess. It doesn't mean it's the best representation. Try modelling a cyclic graph in a relational way and you'll quickly tie yourself in knots trying to update and query it. The point is, relational databases a great for storing data that you've decided to model relationally. If you decide not to, then you probably want some other sort of database.

The point is, relational databases a great for storing data that you've decided to model relationally. If you decide not to, then you probably want some other sort of database.

Sure. But that database is not MongoDB.

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

#324

Post by gaius »

rhizome wrote: post #19
gremlinsinc wrote: post #2

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..

I had a phone screen with a company just a couple of months ago that ran on MongoDB and they were committed to it.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet!

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

#325

Post by skrebbel »

orf wrote: post #267
elvinyung wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just one bullet point Tell me again how Postgres can seamlessly do horizontal scaling and synchronous replication?

https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 > MongoDB’s version 0 replication protocol is inherently unsafe. Tell me again how MongoDB took 8 years to get to the point where its replication is kind of OK.

This subthread is about the future, not the past. 8 years ago, PG didn't have json support so your point is moot.

I'm very curious about what people think about the future of Mongo, independently and particularly in comparison to Postgres. However every time that comes up, people keep bringing up that Mongo was a buggy piece of crap in some irrelevant past. So what?

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

#326

Post by gaius »

z3t4 wrote: post #201

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.

Bait and switch

They promise that it's so easy to use you don't need a DBA, you don't need any ops staff to run it, etc, just develop and go! Then once you're in too deep, they get you...

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

#327

Post by bad_user »

The irony of the situation is that MongoDB is now pretty good at horizontal scalability, probably because of all the big companies that were fooled into using it, which then had to fix it :-)

Seeing the comments in this thread, it's interesting how it gets compared with PostgreSQL. People are missing the point — NoSQL only happened because of horizontal scalability requirements, being the number one reason for why people want NoSQL.

Just because PostgreSQL can now store and interrogate JSON, that doesn't mean that PostgreSQL can scale horizontally. In fact PostgreSQL sucks at horizontal scaling, historically its replication story has been worse than MySQL actually.

And might not have big data, but you might want redundancy and scenarios with pretty tight SLAs are not uncommon at all.

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

#328

Post by paulmd »

porker wrote: post #231
paulmd wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> NoSQL really fits best around the margins, like as an auxiliary system for analytics. I'd say it also fits well in two niches: document datastores (so long as there's some JOIN support, via referencing nested documents vs direct nesting) and graph stores. I remember 10+ years ago working on storing nested sets in the RDBMS and it wasn't pretty. And the RDBMS schema for Magento 1, with key-value tables all over the…

Can you define what "nested sets" means more specifically?

Postgres supports hierarchical/nested structures using the "ltree" column type. There is nothing stopping you from defining a primary key of (eg) "set1.set10.set100". There is also support for recursive views/etc to operate on these kinds of sets.

Again, if you have some kind of "sparse" column, it can make sense to put that into a JSONB column. This is effectively the same thing as attaching an unstructured document to a record for this use-case.

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

#329

Post by gaius »

qaq wrote: post #236
bad_user wrote: post #193

Earlier 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.

what % of people have workload beyond something that PG on i3.16xlarge can handle?

I always think this when people talk about scaling. You can buy off the shelf now boxes with 48 or 96 cores, 1-2T of RAM, internal bays for 10s of T of SSD or connect it to an AFA and get 100s of T. This is not even an exotic custom build system, just a commodity, and has been for years. Running a recent version of a conventional database on a box like this goes a very, very long way, with very little hassle because you don't even need to think about "sharding", and you can always add a hotstandby for offloading reads, or for redundancy in another DC, or whatever. Systems like this can quite happily bottleneck on the network before the database starts breaking a sweat.

Remember, sharding isn't scaling the database. Sharding is admitting your database can't scale so you're offloading the problem to another layer.

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

#330

Post by amazingman »

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…

Good for them. I hope their longer-term employees who likely traded lower salary for stock options get a nice windfall from this.
Post reply on HN