131–140 of 237 posts
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On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".
And the return to timesharing systems.
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And the return to timesharing systems.
Is that a everything-new-is-old description for cloud offerings?
https://youtu.be/O9upVbGSBFo?t=340 (05:40 - 10:50)
Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…
How’s Snowflake doing? One thing these database companies have going for themselves, is that once a customer company’s data and code is locked in to a particular database, then it becomes very very hard to get out. Not impossible, but just very difficult.
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But it’s the only real player in their market. RethinkDB with MongoDB ‘performance’ would have blown them out of the water.
But it’s the only real player in their market Not at all. All of MongoDB is just a feature in Postgres, and Postgres does it better, and Postgres does hundreds more things too.
being hip, which is one of the most important factors for choosing a database database technology, is not one of them though.
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MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.
I have used Mongo for 9 years. First at a game company, then for several prototypes that made it to production in my current role. We have not lost data once. Many of my friends at medium-sized companies use Mongo for much larger projects and have not lost data a single time, either. And it is it not just me and my friends -- HSBC recently announced they are moving 65 of its relational databases to mongodb. I am not…
MongoDB and ArangoDB did well so there seems to be a valid case for new databases. Rethink was loved by HN commenters. I used it in a startup I was working at in 2015-2017 and it was a pleasure.
Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…
I don’t know if this is a corollary, but when I try to come up with an example of someone getting rich selling databases, I think of companies known more for their sales than their engineering.
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I have used Mongo for 9 years. First at a game company, then for several prototypes that made it to production in my current role. We have not lost data once. Many of my friends at medium-sized companies use Mongo for much larger projects and have not lost data a single time, either. And it is it not just me and my friends -- HSBC recently announced they are moving 65 of its relational databases to mongodb. I am not…
Genuine question: What does mongo give you as a JSON store that postgres's JSONB doesn't?
And back when I started with it, JSONb did not exist. I would say JSONB was also a godsend though as our roadmaps now have a clear path to something we may prefer later. People up the chain are often terrified when they hear the word "mongo" so the existence of JSONB makes it easier to swap out your layer that handles database interactions.
But the speed advantage really lies in the early-stage prototype development. If I have to do it in postgres, the amount of code necessary up front, when inevitable schema changes happen, etc. makes mongo preferable until things settle down.
But again, it all depends on how well you know the thing up front. If you can anticipate a lot of iteration on the data model as you learn how people use your product, mongo is handy early. If I am given a spec for something where all of the things are known and foreseen, I am going with postgresql.
I assume that the hardest thing to do is making something people want to use. If I can achieve that with whatever I use, I have some good (and fun) problems on my hands. And it is all about structuring the work so that I am not tied to any database product. I am no longer working on startups with little-to-no funding, so right now I assume AWS or Azure will manage a database better than I can. And I assume new things are always coming.
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I firmly believe that RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB and Elasticsearch if they could have gotten additional funding or focused more on business development. Note: both MongoDB and Elasticsearch are now hugely successful public companies. - Changefeeds were so useful and still to this day not really matched in quality. - Official client libraries were very high quality. I mainl…
I liked the RethinkDB API better too. Seemed more intuitive and you could do something like joins in it too.
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How’s Snowflake doing? One thing these database companies have going for themselves, is that once a customer company’s data and code is locked in to a particular database, then it becomes very very hard to get out. Not impossible, but just very difficult.
I've heard this line many times but is this actually true? Are there stories or statistics of these things?
Some context: this is for expansive legacy application databases that have many years of tenure or large data warehouse applications. If you've ever worked in the enterprise data space, you'll be tripping over this sort of workload left and right.