With $42M more, 10gen wants to take MongoDB mainstream

http://gigaom.com/cloud/with-42m-more-10gen-wants-to-take-mongodb-mainstream/

by znq • 14 years ago

130 58 14 years ago

twog• 14 years ago

Congrats 10gen! Its pretty awesome to see a company built on open source technologies doing so well. The community wins & the VCs win.

gaius3• 14 years ago

That's a web scale investment!

taligent3• 14 years ago

All the best to them.

I hope they continue to market MongoDB on its merits and not as some replacement for SQL databases. Both models have their place and there are plenty of use cases where one or the other is more suited.

luigi• 14 years ago

Marketing it as a viable alternative seems right to me:

http://www.10gen.com/why-mongodb

sylvinus• 14 years ago

Bravo!

Irishsteve2• 14 years ago

How long before Oracle buy them

taligent3• 14 years ago

By the looks of it they may have to buy someone.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/25/nosql_vs_mysql/

gaius3• 14 years ago

Nope: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/nosqldb/overview/...

ebiester• 14 years ago

They already have a very similar BerkeleyDB, don't they?

hogu• 14 years ago

berkeley db is not similar, mongodb allows you to store json, and create indexes on many parts of the json, and query on those as well. with berkeley db you have to build that in yourself in the application, not in the database.

Trollolol• 14 years ago

Even Oracle has some taste.

Plus, I think they have the single-server-database-that-doesn't-scale-easily market covered.

Irishsteve2• 14 years ago

Once Mongo starts to get traction with the banks of the world Oracle will be forced to step in and buy them.

wamatt• 14 years ago

Would love to know what valuation, they raised at.

Ricapar• 14 years ago

I'd really love to be using MongoDB... but we're a Solaris on Sparc and IBM on Power shop. No support for either one of these, sadly.

dm_mongodb• 14 years ago

Goal 1 of the financing was funds to accelerate r&d, to hire engineers to do things like the ones you mention above; in addition more r&d just pushing hard to maximize overall product quality, stability, etc. not sure if those exact things will get done and exactly when yet. I'd definitely like to see the solaris build get some attention. dwight/10gen

xxqs• 14 years ago

a patchset for non-Intel CPU support was around for years, and you guys completely ignored its existence. As well as all the critics towards non-word-aligned data structures and in-memory presentation.

how about redesigning the whole product with all that cash?

zzzeek• 14 years ago

Now is the time to buy stock in mug manufacturers, seeing as I'm already awash in MongoDB mugs everywhere think how many more $42M can buy....

igorgue• 14 years ago

But the important question here is: How big is the mug market? Every developer, I know, has a MongoDB mug already. This makes me question, how their mug strategy is going to be with this new investment?

mdennewitz• 14 years ago

get another mug, make another cup of coffee. even in "mug mode", it's a good idea to have a hot standby.

rozza• 14 years ago

I ended up sharding my mug :(

dirn• 14 years ago

I have a shelf dedicated to my MongoDB mugs, and there's still some room for them to grow.

ryandotsmith• 14 years ago

I found a great use for the mug. https://twitter.com/ryandotsmith/status/98445779173244928

chadrs• 14 years ago

I drink coffee out of the 10gen mug because IT SCALES REALLY WELL

eragnew• 14 years ago

Is there a CouchDb mug?

ericmoritz• 14 years ago

Relevant: http://vimeo.com/13667174

kisstheblade2• 14 years ago

What an amazing amount of money. Apparently they have got $70m+ in total. Our small/mid sized company with about 20 employees could operate for about 50 years with that amount of cash...

An apparently they already pay for themselves: "“Business is fantastic,” 10gen President Max Schireson told me. “We keep outperforming every goal that we set for ourselves and the market just feels like it’s huge.” In fact, he said, new sales people pay for themselves almost immediately upon joining the company."

So I wonder what they are going to do with that huge pile of cash? R&D for a single DB surely can't be that expensive (or at least it would be difficult to get that many people to suddenly work on productive things that would actually improve the product and not just make it bloatware).

Apparently the hype works, for a DB that is about scaling but doesn't scale yet? "Just another $100m and we'll get there"?

How many people actually need a DB that "scales" better than mysql/postgres which are much easier to use and better supported and understood?

" Among other things, it has been criticized for being rather difficult to manage at scale. This is somewhat ironic, as scalability, along with the flexibility that comes with being schemaless, is among the driving factors behind the NoSQL movement. One would expect the most-popular of the bunch to scale with ease."

daleharvey• 14 years ago

disclaimer: I used to work for Couchbase, and am still involved in the CouchDB community

'Magic Scaling' isnt the only reason people use alternative data stores such as Mongo (or Couch), in fact as shown it can often turn out to be a really bad idea to do so. I wouldnt still be interested in CouchDB if it was just 'do stuff a bit differently from mysql and everything will work at scale' type database.

Schemaless, Native JSON, master master replication, HTTP API are all features which can be hugely beneficial to particular applications over tradition RDBMS' (those were only a few features and they were probably bias towards CouchDB because I know that better)

fstephany• 14 years ago

Right, the schemaless and native JSON are the main reason I switched my products to MongoDB. Scalability is not an issue for 99% of the projects i've worked on.

Easier mapping between my domain model (I mainly use Smalltalk) and the persistence is a huge win.

progolferyo• 14 years ago

You'd be surprised, "scaling" a database is something that more and more folks are having to do lately, with the onslaught of mobile apps and facebook apps and web apps, it's just a whole lot easier to create an application that gets hundreds of thousands of users - millions of users.

And more importantly, you can have an application that has hundreds of thousands of users and not really make a ton of money, so you kinda need something that is easy to use because you don't have the capital

pbreit• 14 years ago

You partially answered your question: funds will go to making the DB better and towards support. But a lot of it will go to sales and marketing.

encoderer• 14 years ago

I think your post proves the theory that they have a lot of product education work to do.

It's not just about scaling. IMO it's about teaching the vast armies of software developers that work on proprietary line-of-business software that there is variety in data stores and that they should be using the right tool for the job.

I shudder to think about how many EAV anti-patterns have been implemented on top of relational databases. Or how many 1-table-per-X databases there are. Or how many "json" columns and "blob" columns and "xml" columns have been added to otherwise innocent tables who did not deserve that kind of abuse.

That alone -- educating and giving tools and support to engineers outside of the tech industry -- is no easy task.

fleitz• 14 years ago

MongoDB is webscale, that's all you need to know, keep in mind that webscale means a database that will fit in 16 to 256 GB of RAM, and doesn't need transaction support.

kisstheblade2• 14 years ago

Thanks for all the replies. I wasn't actually trying to put mongodb (or nosql in general) down, there sure is a use for these technologies. The amount of money just seems staggering (money in the IT world nowadays seems to be off the charts, re. facebook et. al.), and it probably will be hard to put it all to productive use. But it will of course also help to improve the product so no worries :)

And indeed, I do have a relational database with a column that stores json! The horrors :)

You could help me get familiar with mongodb, any good real world tutorials for it? I have played with it just a little.

systemizer• 14 years ago

Let's face it, most companies are still built on relational database systems. I'm assuming that a lot of this money will go forward to changing this "culture" and injecting NoSQL into tech industries that have yet to adopt it.

...or they could just wait for the next generation of young developers to take leadership roles at BigCorp.

RedwoodCity• 14 years ago

For years intel claimed that developers would never port their code from x86 to a different archiecture. The recent wave of mobile devices for iOS and Android has shown this to be completely wrong.

In the future DBA's that only know how to use a relational database will be obsolete, because younger developers that know how to use mysql and various nosql solutions will take their jobs.

gringomorcego• 14 years ago

hope they get rid of that global write lock first...

gdw2• 14 years ago

Version 2.2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013953

fennecfoxen• 14 years ago

Yes, we saw, the per-database write lock. It's soooo much better.

Come on, guys. They have real NoSQL datastores out there... with more sophisticated strategies than "keep it all in memory and let the operating system swap everything to disk" to boot.

amalag• 14 years ago

I am surprised Clustrix (YC) hasn't gotten more attention. They rewrite SQL databases and claim to be able to scale them. Maybe the up front cost scares people.

trimbo• 14 years ago

And because Clustrix is only available via an appliance.

trustfundbaby• 14 years ago

> 10gen has invested heavily in ease of use and functionality early on rather than just speed and scalability. Because it’s so easy to use, MongoDB has attracted lots of web developers who don’t mind working around its scalability shortcomings

followed them from pretty early on, and I found the opposite was the case, with their heavy emphasis on the easiness of sharding, as well as coming out the gate with 'safe writes' turned off.

davedx• 14 years ago

"cement MongoDB as the NoSQL database of choice for businesses of all types and maybe even make it a household name"

The hype is ridiculous. You mean like Oracle DB is a "household name"? No, I didn't think so.

seiji• 14 years ago

It sounds like they've let their ego overtake their product.

kayoone• 14 years ago

Great news for business models based on open source! However i would much rather like to see Riak as the NoSQL db of choice.

justinjlynn• 14 years ago

How do you feel about the open core nature of Riak? I mean, I would jump to it for some of my uses in a second, but I find that the lack of multi-dc replication support in the open source edition is kind of a killer for my use case. I have the reliability need, but I don't really have the heavy usage to support such an endeavor (as it's something of a personal project).

bconway• 14 years ago

But keep in mind that's really only $40M after data loss.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I was going to say "why, were they paid in Bitcoin?" but then I thought this story was a bit too meme-heavy already.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

$42 million is nice and all, but the real question here is: will it scale? Stay tuned until next week folks when we find out, "IF IT WILL SCALE!" cue crowd cheer

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

If only "Will it scale?" was as entertaining as "Will it blend?"

protolif• 14 years ago

As long as 10gen doesn't turn into Oracle, I'm fine with it.

With $42M more, 10gen wants to take MongoDB mainstream

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