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MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

investors.mongodb.com

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Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#61

Post by orochimaaru »

cpursley wrote: post #51
orochimaaru wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use their atlas offering. It’s a bit pricey but we are very happy with it. It’s got a bunch of stuff integrated - vectors, json (obviously), search and charting along with excellent support for drivers and very nice out of the box monitoring. Now I could possible spend a bunch of time and do the same thing with open source dbs - but why? I have a small team and stuff to deliver. Atlas allows me to do it fast.

There’s a ton of hosted Postgres providers that do all of that and more and are just as simple to use. Neon.tech is really easy to set up and if you need more of a baas (firebase alternative), Supabase. Plus, no vendor lock in. I’ve moved vendors several times, most recently AWS RDS to Neon and it was nearly seamless. Was originally on Heroku Postgres going way back. Try getting off Atlas…

Ha - easier said than done in an enterprise, especially when nothing is wrong. Maybe the $$, but at some point the effort involved with supply chain and reengineering dwarfs any “technical” benefit.

This is why startups like to get into a single supply chain contract with an enterprise - it’s extremely hard to get it setup, but once done very easy to reuse the template.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#62

Post by skatanski »

slt2021 wrote: post #21
bithavoc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that’s what I thought, but every single candidate I interviewed mentioned MongoDB as their recent reference document database, I asked the last candidate if they were self-hosting, the answer is no, they used MongoDB cloud.

if you a developer you wanna use MongoDB as database, not be MongoDB SRE and DBA thats the reason for using Atlas

Precisely, and if you are enterprise, you want to have an option to request priority support and have a lot of features out of the box. Also some of the search features are only available in Atlas unfortunately.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#63

Post by skatanski »

orochimaaru wrote: post #42
cpursley wrote: post #23

How is MongoDB still a thing when there's already several ways to handle json in Postgres including Microsofts new documentdb extension: https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f... What am I missing? Are Mongo users simply front end folks who didn't have time to learn basic SQL or back end architecture?

We use their atlas offering. It’s a bit pricey but we are very happy with it. It’s got a bunch of stuff integrated - vectors, json (obviously), search and charting along with excellent support for drivers and very nice out of the box monitoring. Now I could possible spend a bunch of time and do the same thing with open source dbs - but why? I have a small team and stuff to deliver. Atlas allows me to do it fast.

Similar here, there are gotchas though. Some versions ago they've changed their query optimization engine - some of our "slow aggregations" become "unresponsive aggregations" because suboptimal indexes were suddenly used. We had to use hints to force proper indexing. Their columnar db offering is quite bad - I'd say if there's need for analytical functionality, its better to go with a different db. Oplog changes format - and although its expected, it still hurts me every now and then when I need to check something. Similarly at some point they've changed how nested arrays are updated in changestream, which has broken our auditing (its not recommended to use changestream for auditing, we still did ;) ). We've started using NVM instances for some of our more heavily used clusters. Well it turned out recovery of an NVM cluster is much much slower than a standard cluster. But all in all I really like mongodb, if there are no relations - its a good choice. Its also good for prototyping.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#64

Post by beoberha »

connectsnk wrote: post #49

I understand the criticisms, but in my experience, MongoDB has come a long way. Many of the earlier issues people mention have been addressed. Features like sharding, built-in replication, and flexible schemas have made scaling large datasets much smoother for me. It’s not perfect, but it’s a solid choice.

I think the amount of people working on large enterprise systems here is a lot smaller than one would think.

Whenever a fly.io post about sqlite ends up in here, there are a scary amount of comments about using sqlite in way more scenarios than it should be.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#65

Post by magarnicle »

burningion wrote: post #26
Cshelton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use it a lot for a specific use-case and it works great. Mongo has come a long long way since the release over a decade ago, and if you keep it in Majority Read and Write, it's very reliable. Also, on some things, it allows us to pivot much faster. And now with the help of LLMs, writing "Aggregation Pipelines" are very fast.

I've been using Mongo while developing some analysis / retrieval systems around video, and this is the correct answer. Aggregation pipelines allow me to do really powerful search around amorphous / changing data. Adding a way to automatically update / recalculate embeddings to your database makes even more sense.

Do you have any tricks for writing and debugging pipelines? I feel like there are so many little hiccups that I spend ages figuring out if that one field name needs a $ or not.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#66

Post by rpep »

bithavoc wrote: post #5
schnebbau wrote: post #2

How does MongoDB still have that much available to spend? Everyone I know moved off it years ago.

that’s what I thought, but every single candidate I interviewed mentioned MongoDB as their recent reference document database, I asked the last candidate if they were self-hosting, the answer is no, they used MongoDB cloud.

You cant use the embeddings/vector search stuff this refers to in self hosted anyway, it’s only implemented in their Atlas Cloud product. It makes it a real PITA to test locally. The Atlas Dev local container didn’t work the same when I tried it earlier in the year.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#67

Post by jamesrr39 »

Genuine question: I appreciate the comments about MongoDB being much better than it was 10 years ago; but Postgres is also much better today than then as well. What situations is Mongo better than Postgres? Why choose Mongo in 2025?

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#68

Post by thayne »

computerfan494 wrote: post #37
cpursley wrote: post #23

How is MongoDB still a thing when there's already several ways to handle json in Postgres including Microsofts new documentdb extension: https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f... What am I missing? Are Mongo users simply front end folks who didn't have time to learn basic SQL or back end architecture?

I will copy and paste a comment I wrote here previously: "MongoDB ships with horizontal sharding out-of-the-box, has idiomatic and well-maintained drivers for pretty much every language you could want (no C library re-use), is reasonably vendor-neutral and can be run locally, and the data modeling it encourages is both preferential for some people as well as pushes users to avoid patterns that don't scale very well w…

> MongoDB ships with horizontal sharding out-of-the-box

Maybe it's better than it was, but my experience with Mongodb a decade ago is that that horizontal sharding didn't work very well. We constantly ran into data corruption and performance issues with rebalancing the shards. So much so that we had a company party to celebrate moving off of Mongodb.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#69

Post by 999900000999 »

jamesrr39 wrote: post #67

Genuine question: I appreciate the comments about MongoDB being much better than it was 10 years ago; but Postgres is also much better today than then as well. What situations is Mongo better than Postgres? Why choose Mongo in 2025?

Simple.

Postgres is hard, you have to learn SQL. SQL is hard and mean.

Mongo means we can just dump everyone into a magic box and worry about it later.No tables to create.

But their is little time, we need to ship our CRUD APP NOW! No one on the team knows SQL!

I'm actually using Postgres via Supabase for my current project, but I would probably never use straight up Postgres.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#70

Post by riku_iki »

jamesrr39 wrote: post #67

Genuine question: I appreciate the comments about MongoDB being much better than it was 10 years ago; but Postgres is also much better today than then as well. What situations is Mongo better than Postgres? Why choose Mongo in 2025?

Mongo is real distributed and scalable DB, while postgres is single server DB, so main consideration could be if you need to scale beyond single server.
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