MongoDB has filed confidentially for IPO

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/15/database-provider-mongodb-has-filed-confidentially-for-ipo/?ncid=rss

by abhi3 • 9 years ago

206 104 9 years ago

nodesocket• 9 years ago

Wow interesting. Anybody have their S-1 filing? Interested to see how their hosted/managed offering Atlas[1] is doing vs support contracts.

[1] https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas

jorts• 9 years ago

It's not public for the time being as per the article.

jnordwick• 9 years ago

No public S1 until up to 15 days before the ipo under the confidential provision.

notyourwork2• 9 years ago

I have never heard of a confidential IPO, how does this differ from any other IPO that is in the news?

cm2012• 9 years ago

It's just an earlier announcement. The banks involved leak it almost every time.

adamson• 9 years ago

Why is it in their interest to leak the announcement? Wouldn't that discourage other companies from filing through them in the future?

berberous• 9 years ago

Starting with the JOBS Act (in 2012), certain smaller companies under a revenue threshold were allowed to file their initial draft registration statements with the SEC confidentially. It was meant to encourage startups to go public and avoid the public eye while they negotiated their registration statements with the SEC. It all goes public before the IPO.

notyourwork2• 9 years ago

Thanks for this information.

leothekim• 9 years ago

They've made their share of mistakes, but they've stuck it out and have definitely improved their product over the years. I wish them all the best for their IPO. What would be really good to see As a measure of their business health is an indication of how their cloud business is doing with respect to their enterprise sales business. A healthy cloud business would signal less volatility in the face of high revenue garnered from fickle enterprise sales relationships that have been their bread and butter until the past couple years.

ZedDogX• 9 years ago

I haven't used MongoDB but I've listened to those who are pushing for it. Yes, that's unfortunate that mistakes have been made (especially when it comes to databases). But, better to find that mistake early on rather than later. And it speaks to the founders dedication to the project that they navigated the rough waters and saw it through.

meowface• 9 years ago

Reliability and implementation ideas aside, MongoDB popularized document stores and document stores can sometimes be a good thing (even if there's usually little to no reason to prefer them to plain SQL databases for most applications). So they deserve credit there.

GenericsMotors• 9 years ago

Agreed; though the way they did their marketing early on the message they conveyed was that document databases were here to replace RDBMSs. It was extremely dishonest.

ynniv• 9 years ago

That's only because you forgot about Lotus Notes. Perhaps they will have similar fates.

e12e• 9 years ago

I thought filsystems popularised document stores ;-)

olegkikin• 9 years ago

A side note: MongoDB now dominates the famous framework benchmark in the read benchmarks.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

kuschku2• 9 years ago

With 1.4% more performance than PostgreSQL, and far less guarantees w.r.t. schema.

Yeah, that's not hard. It's surprising it took them this long.

EDIT: The performance comparison that was linked, and that I was referring to: http://i.imgur.com/Thk5DlU.png

elvinyung2• 9 years ago

Edit: I'm dumb (and bad at reading words).

I don't believe this assessment is entirely fair -- MongoDB essentially commits every write to a majority quorum of nodes.

Remind me again how many machines a standard Postgres INSERT/UPDATE commits to?

(Disclaimer: I still like Postgres better.)

mrgordon2• 9 years ago

Yep exactly. People fall for these benchmarks too easily (especially the ones released by 10gen themselves)

merb• 9 years ago

well I wouldn't account that benchmark. Not for mongodb and especially not for PostgreSQL. TechEmpower Benchmarks are mostly not really showcasing real world. Just looking at their PostgreSQL config will highlight that. (Especially: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...) And also most of the time their libraries/frameworks are outdated or not even configured correctly. It shouldn't be taken as a reference in any way without additional benchmarking.

mrgordon2• 9 years ago

Here is where I point out that MongoDB dominated write benchmarks when it first came out. And then everyone complained loudly that the benchmark was writing to PostgreSQL and flushing to disk while Mongo turned off safe writes so they'd do better on the benchmark. Once that was fixed, Mongo plummeted towards the bottom of the rankings.

Best marketed database ever.

a13n• 9 years ago

Wow I had no idea they were a for profit corp, rather than an open source project. And my startup uses mongo. Mind blown! Good for them.

rpeden2• 9 years ago

There's no reason a for profit company can't ship an open source project. :)

MongoDB is an open source project, and the MongoDB company is a for profit corporation that ships the database and sells support and services related to it.

discordance• 9 years ago

Yes this is true, although what happens when the profit motivated corporation doesn't make profits or loses revenue?

Isn't it more likely that a profit motivated OSS project will lose resources in this case, potentially affecting the product?

arrty88• 9 years ago

Get ready for another SNAP!

BinaryIdiot• 9 years ago

I don't see why. SNAP hasn't really figured out how to make money and their features were easy to copy (and copy better) in Facebook's properties.

MongoDB is far longer established, has a large enterprise business and likely has a sizable cloud business. These are not "features" you slap onto another product and then simply have users come flooding to you. No, databases are pretty critical pieces of infrastructure.

As long as the business is solid this IPO should work out well, IMO.

api• 9 years ago

This is huge -- we haven't actually had that many open source based IPOs!

perseusprime112• 9 years ago

Will meet similar fate like Twitter, Snapchat...

bdcravens2• 9 years ago

Perhaps, but wouldn't it make sense to compare them to another software infrastructure company, rather than social networks?

perseusprime112• 9 years ago

I am not comparing them but simply predicting the fate based on overblown expectations that were similar to Twitter and SnapChat.

hendzen4• 9 years ago

Both Hortonworks & Cloudera are the most similar recent IPOs. Hortonworks is below the offering price, Cloudera has been basically flat. And this is in the context of an insane bull market for tech stocks and the market in general.

So we will see how this turns out. It's been a couple years since they last raised funding so its possible they didn't really have another choice. Chances are if the numbers on the S-1 were truly great they wouldn't have done it confidentially.

vqc2• 9 years ago

Do you have any info that companies that don't have great numbers tend to file S-1's confidentially compared to companies with great numbers?

In my experience, companies that can file confidentially will, regardless of their numbers (and I think all companies now have the option to do so).

hendzen4• 9 years ago

Nutanix, Twilio are two recent ones (IPO'd in 2016). They both were great performers last year.

I don't have the time to dig up all the data and do a comparison of the correlation between returns on companies that used the confidentiality exception vs. companies that didn't, but it would certainly be an interesting analysis.

zjaffee• 9 years ago

It's worse than that, cloudera went public at a valuation below the price set during their last round of fundraising. Also, people are bullish on tech companies that are consumer tech related or are in the enterprise space serving industries not relating to tech directly. P/E ratios for companies like oracle, ibm and cisco aren't that high.

sidi• 9 years ago

Not true. Oracle's P/E is 22, Apple's is 18, MSFT's is 27. Oracle is doing just fine.

jitix• 9 years ago

MongoDBs market is not exactly the same as the Hadoop vendors' although there are overlaps. One of the biggest driver of adoption for mongo are projects that start out as small, rapidly done prototypes and then grow large. It's really easy to start with and scale to decent amounts of data with mongodb.

hendzen4• 9 years ago

It's not the same exact market but its essentially the same business model - build a community around an open source system and then upsell enterprise customers on support, consulting & services.

myth_drannon2• 9 years ago

It looks like the NoSQL movement was just a fad and plenty of startups got burned by it and some still stuck with this tech , writing inefficient workarounds for something that comes OTB with the regular SQL databases.

webscalist• 9 years ago

lol trello: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3485186

myth_drannon2• 9 years ago

well, there are so many... using mongodb for CRUD apps and realizing they can't do joins.

redwood2• 9 years ago

that comment is over 2000 days old. wow

stuffedBelly• 9 years ago

Startups got burnt by NoSQL because they wanted to use it for everything instead of thinking over use cases that fit. It's a good thing that this fad went away and now people would be more likely to educate themselves about relational vs. non-relational db before jumping into the fire pit.

dsmithatx• 9 years ago

I worked with one of the largest ad publishing companies. They wanted to track data about every client served an ad. This generated over 1.2 Terabyte per hour of data when the MySQL master started to max out. We had the largest possible multiple core system. It was going to cost my client $30k to upgrade to SSD drives to get more out of MySQL. Also note we had to store this data on an expensive SAN in order to feed the data at a reasonable rate to MySQL or PostgreSQL.

I had just learned of MongoDB and went to school at 10gen for their sys admin class. I talked to the developer about storing the data in NoSQL using a small sharded cluster on a Friday. Monday morning he asked me to setup a MongoDB cluster. Tuesday we moved over from MySQL. They ended up using much smaller servers, got rid of the 3par and epsilon SAN's and saving tons of money.

My point is there are certain situations where NoSQL is still the answer unless you can cluster your SQL write server. I've moved on from working with Ad publishing clients but, I'm sure there are other places where SQL databases are not adequate.

NoSQL might be or, have been, a fad but, like any tool when used for the right job it works.

qaq3• 9 years ago

A production large scale ad. system system that was doing 1.2 TB per hour in writes, was migrated over from MySQL to MongoDB in roughly 24 hour window cool story Bro.

foxh0und• 9 years ago

Was $30k a lot of money for one of the largest add publishers?

tehlike2• 9 years ago

sounds like the wrong tool. what you are producing was probably logs data, which is immutable. There are far more efficient (storage, cpu) write-only stores.

0xbear• 9 years ago

The largest ad system ever, Google AdSense, used MySQL until circa 2014 when it moved to a completely custom DB backend, F1. F1 is also a SQL database, however.

Google does use bigtable and such where appropriate, but for anything more complex than dumb key/value you can't do much better than regular DBs. Some people think they can, but 99% of the time they're mistaken.

dx0342• 9 years ago

How can MongoDB use that much less in such a situation? Especially prior to WireTiger?

An optimised schema in a relational database should be close to the minimum possible storage.

deepGem• 9 years ago

I have to agree that there was a lot of noise in the nosql world and a lot of people got carried away by the ease of use metric. I guess people were lured by the prospect of not having to write SQL joins.

That said I found nosql databases extremely helpful for storing and querying large unstructured data. Mostly because it was really hard to build relations and to store this data in tables. Think Wikipedia for instance. Since then my way of choosing databases is to try and model data into a relational db as much as possible and if that doesn't work out choose a nosql equivalent.

hvidgaard3• 9 years ago

With Postgre you don't need to use a different database unless your workload is "bigdata". You can store relational data alongside unstructures json and query both.

frik• 9 years ago

Can we get revived WebSQL support?

We can thank it a rough Mozilla devs that long moved one, that WebSQL got stopped and is support in Webkit and Blink (100% mobile devices, 80% notebook), but not on Firefox. Instead this NoSQL IndexedDB was introduced. Let's get over NoSQL fad, and support SQL in web browser!

fulafel• 9 years ago

DynamoDB seems to be the flavour of the day for this, people are using it even in cases where a non-sharded SQL system would work fine.

giancarlostoro• 9 years ago

Depends on what you're doing. We've used it on at least one production product at work where it works fine and probably will not be replaced. (If it's not broken don't fix it TM)

romanovcode• 9 years ago

There are a good reason to use NoSQL, for example to replace EAV. But definitely not a good use to do everything on NoSQL so most companies opted out for 2 database solution = SQL + NoSQL and did not get burned.

The thing however is that since Postgres released indexed BSON support (which is actually faster then MongoDB) there is absolutely no point in opting for 2 database solution and making things harder for no reason.

TL;DR

Use Postgres.

RandalSchwartz• 9 years ago

Or, get the best of both worlds. ToroDB puts a mongo wire protocol in front of Postgres, which outperforms mongo significantly on the same hardware. Plus, you can get read-only views on the Pg side to join with traditional relational data.

overcast• 9 years ago

Which amazes me how RethinkDB never eclipsed all of the other "nosql" offerings. A relational, realtime, document store. You get the benefits from both sides.

chirau• 9 years ago

I hope at some point they realize the value in queueing writes versus prioritizing. Maybe I did it wrong but that totally put me off

flavio812• 9 years ago

Really? I thought the MongoDB fad had gone away, that common sense returned, and people either used proper document stores, or proper relational databases, or graph databases.

dajohnson892• 9 years ago

Could you be a little more specific as to what a proper document store is? Mongodb has impressed me after using it for two years in a highly concurrent and rapidly changing big data production system. It's not without its significant headaches, but I've yet to find a database that is.

flavio812• 9 years ago

There are many articles out there on the web, over the last 5 years, addressing the many problems specific to MongoDB. For example:

http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never...

http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9912842

http://developer.olery.com/blog/goodbye-mongodb-hello-postgr...

https://www.andreas-jung.com/contents/goodbye-mongodb

noncoml• 9 years ago

Congrats. I wish them all the best.

I know MomgoDB is not very favored in HN but if there is one thing Mongo taught us, is that a nice and simple API to access your data makes a world of difference.

jaequery• 9 years ago

think it is a bad fit and a bad time for an IPO, their market just isnt big enough and their losing a lot of steam as of late.

most importantly in terms of numbers, there is nothing going for them. they arent exactly redhat level in terms of support, nor rackspace level for subscriptions, and nor snapchat level in terms of market reach. this looks like some last effort cash out sort of deal to me. weird to say that its somewhat of a sad outcome for an once promising opensource company.

Salgat• 9 years ago

They recently passed a suite of jepsen tests that finally gives them legitimacy they needed (the latest server release has very good consistency now). MongoDB is in a good place from a technical position.

abrookewood• 9 years ago

That's interesting. I've always avoided Mongo because of the general perception that it loses data, but I'll take Jepsen's tests over hearsay anyday.

patrickfreed2• 9 years ago

their market just isnt big enough

the database market is one of the biggest software markets out there, if not the biggest.

their losing a lot of steam as of late

at least according ot google trends, mongodb is more popular than ever.

last effort cash out sort of deal to me

they're hiring like crazy and looking to grow a ton in the next year, so I don't think that's the case.

shin_lao• 9 years ago

the database market is one of the biggest software markets out there, if not the biggest

They only address a very small subset of the database market.

0xADEADBEE• 9 years ago

Did you consider that perhaps projection of growth is exactly what you'd do in the event of an IPO? Or that Google trends isn't a sensible heuristic for a valuation?

I've down-voted you not because I disagree fundamentally (although I don't rate MongoDB) but because you are dismantling an argument badly. I hope that isn't too rude.

dx0342• 9 years ago

Google Trends indicates how many new projects look for a database. Database companies typically make money with existing projects (subscription fees or occasionally new versions).

I agree that MongoDB is considered for many new projects but they will have very low market share for existing enterprise projects (which is where the money is).

gaius2• 9 years ago

Now we know for certain that we are in a bubble

pandemicsyn• 9 years ago

Will be interesting to see if Datastax follows with an IPO of their own.

CyberDildonics• 9 years ago

I hope their IPO filing doesn't get lost before it gets synced to disk.

MongoDB has filed confidentially for IPO

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