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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

#391

Post by ojr »

rdslw wrote: post #343
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…

I don't buy "creating a billion-dollar business". Ive read a Bloomberg story on the IPO and saw there two hilarious sequences "MongoDB has 4,300 paying customers. MongoDB employs 820 people in 29 offices" - that does not compute (for me) so I started analyzing their financial report (btw funny is nobody in whole HN discussion quoted numbers from the report so far, but a lot of 'im buying their stock' talks here). In…

you have to buy with borrowed money, sell the stock and then buy the same amount at a lower price to make money shorting, I do not believe you will short them or have the capital to make significant money doing so but it is interesting to see the value you place on your analysis

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

#392

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

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…

Javascript, x86, MySQL, DOS.... the market victors in this industry are often just "good enough" technologically speaking and sometimes even kinda suck.

Add MongoDB to the list. Its "good enough", and marketed well.

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

#393

Post by syllogism »

austenallred wrote: post #390
syllogism wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as you're making a loss, there's a lot of ways to "creatively" grow revenue. In the limit case (which would be fraud), you and I can just trade out expensive invoices, declaring each as a loss. This puts a lot of revenue on our books, with no value exchanged. Mongo don't have to be committing fraud, of course. They could be doing any number of actual business activities that make legitimate trades --- but tra…

Companies optimize for future cashflow, because that’s how value is created.

Mongo's current cashflow is negative, and the trend is increasingly negative.

I had a look at their prospectus, which describes the bulk of their revenue as subscriptions. Subscriptions sound like good unit economics. It's instructive to compare their pitch to investors to the pitch they make their customers: http://s3.amazonaws.com/info-mongodb-com/TCO_MongoDB_vs._Ora...

When Mongo talk to their customers, they describe the license cost as $0 --- they fold that into support. That sounds more like a service.

In other words: customer fires $100k of staff, pays Mongo $80k in "subscription", Mongo hires $120k of staff, which they tally up as "customer success". There's no expense category for support in their prospectus, so clearly the support personnel are filed under "sales and marketing".

It's the same old story. They're just selling $1 bills for $0.80 a piece.

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

#394

Post by elvinyung »

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.

I don't see this as a problem. It takes years for any software project to mature, a DBMS even more so. I'm sure that I can go back to the 1980s and find gamebreaking bugs in the original POSTGRES. It has been years for MongoDB to approach maturity.

Of course I would prefer Postgres when I can use it, and I can generally use it basically all the time, but NoSQL still has its use cases.

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

#396

Post by elvinyung »

shawn-butler wrote: post #198
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?

Synchronous replication was added in 9.1 and much improved in 9.6? pglogical[0] works pretty well for me under 10 but I have no production experience with bdr[1]. [0]: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/pglogical/ [1]: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/bdr/

IMO, sure but it's far from seamless. (I also looked at pg's quorum commits, but the same applies.)

In general Postgres was not designed at its core for a distributed world. Even now, replication feels like an afterthought in the grand scheme of things, and sharding nonexistent without extensions.

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

#397

Post by da_chicken »

tribaal wrote: post #339
da_chicken wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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., "…

> Now, if you're running Reddit or Wikipedia or Facebook or HN... Wikipedia uses MariaDB (so, MySQL). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers#Software

Wikipedia predates NoSQL. It runs on PHP + MySQL because that's what was most popular back in 2001, and they have no intrest in completely rewriting their entire stack just to use Cassandra or MongoDB. That doesn't mean a NoSQL data store wouldn't work extremely well for the type of application that Wikipedia is.

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

#399

Post by timthelion »

dominotw wrote: post #373
timthelion wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has MongoDB improved post funding? I got involved in Docker early and invested about a year of work into a project based on Docker. Docker was slow and had warts and my project ultimately is almost unusable due to Docker's slowness and warts. I knew about the warts near the beginning, but I assumed that when they got $40million, they would fix the warts. They didn't. Indeed, it seems that quality has not changed sinc…

> it has certainly gotten harder to install on linux. Downvoted for this. I haven't used docker much but I just did > yum install docker-ce and started the service. took me less than 2 mins.

I recently was at a seminar where the lady sitting next to me was a network analyst. Her laptop was running debian and she needed to install docker to be able to work along in the seminar, so she did the logical thing which was to go to docker.com and opened the "Get docker" menu. Under that menu, there are two main options, "Mac" and "Windows". She managed to get down to the "for servers" section and click "debian" at which point she was directed to "download docker from the docker store" at which point she was lost for a while. Then she managed to get to this document https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/docker-ce/... at which point I had to help her, because she didn't know which exact version of debian she was running and didn't know how to find out. I would say it was pretty much a catastrophe, as she spent about half an hour trying to get docker installed.

You ran "yum install docker-ce" you were lucky that you knew the name of the package. I didn't know the name on Fedora, and looking here https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/docker-ce/... didn't help one bit. Indeed, that page doesn't include a line with "yum" in it at all!

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

#400

Post by gaius »

qaq wrote: post #356
gaius wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can have 224 cores and 12TB RAM in a commodity Supermicro box.

Indeed. You would need one helluva Postgres workload to overload that. Not one in a million people genuinely have that requirement.
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