MongoDB Raises $150 Million at $1.2 Billion Valuation

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-04/mongodb-becomes-king-of-nyc-startups-with-1-2-billion-valuation.html

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

259 223 13 years ago

bloomberg.com

junto2• 13 years ago

Cool, time to make MongoDb web scale! :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

kailuowang• 13 years ago

That video is a bit unfair. I went to the MongoDB conference in NYC this year. None of the 10gen engineers made such silver bullet claims. They strengthened again and again that MongoDB is with significant limitations and scaling it requires a lot of effort and creativity from the client developer side.

That being said, I do wish they can use this investment to do more feature development than marketing.

untog4• 13 years ago

That video is three years old, though.

junto2• 13 years ago

I know. I added the smiley face because I meant it tongue in cheek.

creamyhorror• 13 years ago

I like this bug report about pymongo (not the MongoDB core itself):

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/PYTHON-532

Step 1. Use Mongo as WEB SCALE DOCUMENT STORE OF CHOICE LOL

...

Step 7. DISCOVER PYMONGO DOES NOT CHECK RETURN VALUES IN MULTIPLE PLACES. DISCOVER ORIGINAL AUTHOR SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED NEAR COMPUTER

rpedela4• 13 years ago

One of the best bug reports I have ever read!

alexholehouse• 13 years ago

Slightly off topic, but at what point does "big data" just become data?

According to wikipedia (which is in line with how I think about big data) "Big data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. "

However, as "big data" becomes more mainstream and more tools/services exist to accommodate data at the peta/exobyte scale does that whole definition stop being relevant for kinds of data we're talking about?

CmonDev• 13 years ago

It's just a buzzword now. "Let's use cloud to do big data analysis to proactively synergise our core competencies".

frostmatthew• 13 years ago

you forgot "disrupt"

kubiiii• 13 years ago

I guess so and 16 MB was certainely considered too large and complex to process it with traditionel data processing applications a few decades ago.

Keyframe• 13 years ago

CmonDev put it nicely. Buzzword. Same when you hear, most of the time, how someone is leveraging Hadoop for whatever.

There are various definitions of what is big data. I like to think of it as whenever the only way to deal with your data is by doing full table scans, then we're in same domain of thinking of big data.

mcphilip• 13 years ago

Working in the risk analytics space, "Big Data" seems to be marketing speak for "you can dump all sorts of loosely structured data into this big bucket and our tools will help you find meaningful trends in it." I've yet to see an installation approaching anything near 300GB, so I think of big data as the new sexier label to put on ad hoc data mining applications.

jeltz5• 13 years ago

But if it is for running ad hoc data mining on relatively small amounts of data, wouldn't a traditional SQL database do the job just as well? Especially with with features like the JSON support in PostgreSQL.

ExpiredLink• 13 years ago

"Big Data" seems to be marketing speak for "you can dump all sorts of loosely structured data into this big bucket and our tools will help you find meaningful trends in it."

That's the description of a data warehouse.

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

I actually first heard the term used in what has turned out be to be a very unusual sense. "Big Data" is like "Big Oil" - it's a term for industries that get their economic clout from the value of their data. Google, for instance, is "Big Data" because it's able to offer the advertising platforms and spam filtering services that it does because of the data it's extracting value from.

cbsmith• 13 years ago

One rule of thumb I've had for people is, "if you can fit it in one computer, it is definitely not big data".

wjnc• 13 years ago

My company actually bought some "big data"-machinery plus consulting and they actually delivered their hardware in a Very Large case. Truly one of those '90s dual big towers. I thought that was pretty funny, considering they put less data in it than fits on a $200 hard drive.

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

MongoDB ... now has about 600 customers, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and MetLife Inc.

I wonder what services they sell to scale it to those customers. It sure doesn't come that way out of the box. Any Mongo customers here?

albedo• 13 years ago

GS doesn't use it for applications that require massive scaling, they already have their own infrastructure in place for that.

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

That's what I was hinting at. MongoDB, the company, is trading on the Goldman name, but Goldman isn't using it for scaling at all.

xradionut• 13 years ago

GS probably resells it to unsuspecting investors as a "AAA" database engine. :)

nasalgoat7• 13 years ago

I'm a Mongo customer. Their customer service is probably the best I've had from an Enterprise vendor in terms of response time and general quality.

Unfortunately, the product itself is so poor I am forced to get the support, and even then I've managed to stump their senior engineers quite a bit with my "impossible" problems.

gaius7• 13 years ago

Pick any company in the Fortune 500, then pick any technology you like and I bet it's in there somewhere. That's simply the nature of organizations with 100,000 employees in a dozen countries.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Impressive. And they're actually a real big data company, not one just tagging big data onto what they do.

dharshanr• 13 years ago

If you having issues managing or scaling MongoDB you need to use a service like MongoDirector.com - make its really easy to deploy and scale shards (even in your own cloud account)

kansface• 13 years ago

Mongo shards are not the answer: http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb

Per the article, Mongo picks just P out of CAP ...

alphadevx• 13 years ago

I know they're hiring like crazy in their new office in Dublin. Big growth spurt, massive cash injection, interesting to see if they become the first big "enterprisey" NoSQL provider.

dkhenry• 13 years ago

Congratulations Mongo. Hopefully they can keep up the pace of improvements they have done over the past few years.

sethbannon• 13 years ago

This is more great news for the NYC startup ecosystem.

ConAntonakos• 13 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. Kudos to MongoDB, Inc. It's a great NoSQL database that's gaining traction.

untog4• 13 years ago

$1.2bn seems utterly mad to me, but kudos to them for getting it.

cmdkeen• 13 years ago

Well they've not got $1.2bn, they've got $150 million. There is nothing to say that they will be able to float or get bought at a similar valuation. I can't see any of the investing arguments for MongoDB that even Facebook had. The whole space is full of competition for starters.

untog4• 13 years ago

That's what I meant - I was congratulating them on getting the $1.2bn valuation. Agreed that there is a lot of competition and little certainty out there, though.

hrjet• 13 years ago

MySQL was bought in cash by Sun for $1 billion. Of course, Sun collapsed after that, so perhaps you are right about the madness.

X4• 13 years ago

Imagine what SUN could have built, if they had $1 billion in cash to spent on a Database. Stupid managers wouldn't let them, but they spent $1 billion on a hyped DB with questionable quality.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

They weren't buying tech, they were buying customers.

dcminter• 13 years ago

The only explanation that ever made sense to me for that transaction was that it was to make them more attractive to their potential purchasers - MySQL was a very strange acquisition choice for Sun but for Oracle and IBM not so much.

gaius7• 13 years ago

... And then Monty and his team all quit, so what Sun actually got for a billion of their shareholder's dollars was the domain name mysql.com. One of the stupidest business decisions of all time.

3am• 13 years ago

Sure, but investors in this round would _lose_ almost 20% if MongoDB got bought for $1B. Now, if it was EMC, CRM, Red Hat, and Intel making small investments in order to have some influence of the strategic direction of the company, that would make sense. But Sequoia? They must have a case for this making better than market returns over a multi-year window. I am skeptical, but I guess I'll have to revaluate...

HarrisonFisk• 13 years ago

It wasn't for 1B cash, it was 800M cash, 200M Sun stock.

jbigelow762• 13 years ago

If a trifle of a service like Instagram can get sold at 1 billion a legitimate piece of technology infrastructure valued at $1.2 seems reasonable to me.

Edit: corrected Instagram sale price from 2 to 1 billion, thanks Elliott

elliottcarlson• 13 years ago

Instagram was bought for $1 billion, not 2 and had a $500 million valuation at the time.

jmcatani• 13 years ago

valuation of a social network = <# of users> * <$ value/user>

valuation of infrastructure = <# of deployments> * <margin/deployment>

The problem is that we cannot get an accurate estimate for the total value of a social network. We can usually get an accurate count of the number of users, and can even decently predict the number of potential users. However, when it comes to the value per user we have no idea what that number is because the avenues of monitization are so murky. Can instagram get just as much money per user as facebook? How about compared to Flickr users? How about SnapChat? Can we get a reasonable predict which social networks are fads and which are here to stay? To me, the value of a social network is much too foggy to reasonably predict.

The valuation of an infrastructure company is much easier to predict - it's a matter of price setting. If you are charging $100k for a product, and every fortune 500 company needs your product at that price, you can expect to be worth about $500M.

adrr• 13 years ago

Instagram had 30 million users. Thats $34 a user. Facebook IPO was close to 100 billion, they had 1 billion users which is $100 a user.

ameoba2• 13 years ago

That's not real money, much of that was overvalued Facebook stock.

jgalt2123• 13 years ago

I dunno. It's a real business with real revenues, and tons of lock in. ORCL is worth $150B. It seems to me anyone who can steal marketshare from them could be worth at least 1% of that amount.

arethuza• 13 years ago

But the Oracle database engine is arguably a pretty small part of that value.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

"This market is $XX billion, we only need to take 1% and we'll be rich" is a common startup fallacy. Stealing customers from Oracle is no easy endeavor.

army• 13 years ago

Oracle sold a product that was absolutely essential to pretty much every major business: there isn't really a good alternative to a transactional relational database running on middle-to-high-end hardware for a lot of companies. Selling something business-critical to customers with deep pockets is a pretty good business strategy. And they only had a couple of direct competitors in that space.

rpedela4• 13 years ago

Is MongoDB going to fix their scalability, performance, JOIN, and data type support problems with the money? Seems like a bad investment to me since a lot of developers are starting to move away from it because of those problems and others.

throwawayyyz• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure their download numbers say otherwise. One or two HN threads complaining about MongoDB every month are not a good indicator for their future success.

crazytony• 13 years ago

In the short term it's probably inversely proportional: more 'complaints' means more people on the platform (or at least experimenting with the platform). In the long term we're all dead anyway.

AlisdairO2• 13 years ago

Yeah. FWIW, working at $BIGCORP, I'm starting to hear buzz around Mongo from quite a few not-very-technical people. I'm pretty negative on Mongo as a technology, but there's no doubt that it's generated a lot of attention.

ddorian43• 13 years ago

what are the data type problems?

jzwinck2• 13 years ago

Well, some of us have been asking for a native high-resolution time type for three years: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1460

rpedela4• 13 years ago

Support for arbitrary-precision decimal. Known as numeric/decimal in Postgres. This can be a problem for financial and scientific applications.

joelhaasnoot• 13 years ago

For every developer you hear that has problems with Mongo, there are probably 5 that are fine with certain downsides.

orthecreedence2• 13 years ago

You're right. It's easy to compile, configure, and start on a dev VPS. It's easy to fill with data and easy to query.

This is the sweet spot: when MongoDB is on a dev VPS and you're building a small product around it. Most devs don't have to worry about the next step.

Then you push everything live. If you're lucky enough to get any real traffic, everything other than 99% read crumbles. You scramble to shard but realize that sharding just doesn't work well, and is incredibly complicated to set up.

Then you start losing data...because the drivers are programmed to not fucking check if the data you sent was actually written (yes, I know, this is fixed). Ok, you set your driver on your flopping app to validate writes, and BAM there goes 80% of the write performance 10gen promised you.

The solution? Just add more shards!! Ok, so now I have 4 shards, each with 3 repsets + 3 config servers. 4 * 3 + 3 = 15. Fifteen servers to handle what one MySQL server could do in its sleep.

Conclusion: MongoDB is terrific as a write-only, developer friendly database that you will never have to scale, ever.

omni2• 13 years ago

Can you point me to an article that explains why you would want JOINs in a NoSQL database to begin with? I thought the entire point was to denormalize your data. I keep seeing this point brought up, but it reads to me like a misguided complaint stemming from misunderstanding how to apply the tech.

rpedela4• 13 years ago

Using hierarchical data structures takes care of the most common use case of JOIN (i.e. "SELECT * FROM a, b, c"). This is a win for MongoDB. However there are times when you want to JOIN multiple hierarchical data structures [1]. Or use a different type of JOIN.

[1] http://tebros.com/2011/07/using-mongodb-mapreduce-to-join-2-...

troyk• 13 years ago

The rethinkdb guys think it's important and have joins in their nosql product. Everytime I try nosql first thing I miss is the ability to query as the need arises without a refactor.

wmf• 13 years ago

The entire point is to go fast; denormalization is a tool, not an end in itself. If, hypothetically (ahem), a database could scale and support joins, why not?

yapcguy2• 13 years ago

How does CouchDB compare? What are the latest thoughts on this?

moox3• 13 years ago

If you're having issues with scaling and performance, you're most likely using MongoDB the wrong way or for the wrong reasons.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

Begging the question. If this is true anyone having trouble with mongo for legit reasons can be labelled as "using it for the wrong reasons."

sandGorgon• 13 years ago

nobody ever got fired for choosing:

1. Oracle

2. SQL Server

3. MongoDB

mattdeboard3• 13 years ago

Oh but I wish they had

throwaway8199• 13 years ago

MongoDB accounted for ~90% of my startup's downtime in its first year of existence. We switched away to MYSQL and suddenly scalability concerns retreated into the future.

mbesto• 13 years ago

Curious - what systems has MongoDB replaced in enterprise companies (like Goldman Sachs, etc)?

pacofvf• 13 years ago

Mainly in-house made no-sql databases.

jzwinck2• 13 years ago

I think a common answer would be "text files." And of course, grep and awk.

dopamean• 13 years ago

I'd never replace awk.

mattdeboard3• 13 years ago

We're replacing at least one collection with text files. That's half Mongo's fault, half our fault for using it to store the kind of info we're storing.

claudiowilson• 13 years ago

I don't think MongoDB should be replacing systems, it should rather be used as a data store for things that otherwise wouldn't be stored because of the high throughput needs, but aren't necessarily critical data.

threeseed8• 13 years ago

I've worked at enterprise companies with MongoDB deployments.

It is replacing Oracle databases which everybody is sick of. And given that most companies aren't clustering it is pretty much a simple drop in and replace scenario.

gregwebs2• 13 years ago

Please use this money to buy the TokuTek fork. I always expected the storage layer to have made much greater progress by now.

teh_klev2• 13 years ago

It's a shame they didn't think about the name a bit longer. In the UK "Mongo" is a fairly disparaging term and I find it hard to pitch MongoDB to customers because of this.

bigdubs• 13 years ago

This is, actually, a real concern. So many companies that want to make a foray into enterprise sales don't think carefully about things that (on the surface) seem inconsequential but are actually hurting your business.

yapcguy2• 13 years ago

You're right.

It's still hard to recommend GIMP to someone looking for an alternative to Photoshop.

Mongo is likely to be a similar distraction:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mong

guynamedloren• 13 years ago

I hope you're not a consultant building web apps for non-technical clients, because if that's the case, I can't imagine the scenario in which it would be necessary to 'pitch MongoDB'.

teh_klev2• 13 years ago

With the best will in the world, even with non-technical clients it's hard to not let slip some technical language.

jeltz5• 13 years ago

It means the same thing in several other countries, including Sweden.

mattdeboard3• 13 years ago

Do you have issues with FlipCam?

bborud• 13 years ago

Good, now they only need to deliver a database :)

tolitius3• 13 years ago

or, given the quality of existing async/fsync guarantees, they'd be better off with just taking the money and running.. away.. fast

jbverschoor• 13 years ago

I was already moving away from mongo

troymc• 13 years ago

I'm curious what you're moving to.

orthecreedence2• 13 years ago

I'm moving away too (er, have already moved). I have chosen RethinkDB and am very happy with it so far.

I think the most important thing to me is that the Rethink guys haven't lied about the database's capabilities and limitations.

10gen did. Both in their marketing and in their sales pitch to us when I worked at Aol. Never once did anybody mention a global write lock when we were talking to them about a write-heavy application.

zshprompt• 13 years ago

Yesterday I was just talking to some folks about how they lock on the DATABASE for a transaction. Yey.

moox3• 13 years ago

Your folks were wrong. They lock on the collection and only on some types of queries.

scottbessler• 13 years ago

No, they lock the entire database for every write.

"MongoDB uses a readers-writer [1] lock that allows concurrent reads access to a database but gives exclusive access to a single write operation."

"Beginning with version 2.2, MongoDB implements locks on a per-database basis for most read and write operations. Some global operations, typically short lived operations involving multiple databases, still require a global “instance” wide lock. Before 2.2, there is only one “global” lock per mongod instance."

source: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/concurrency/

tcgv• 13 years ago

I have been using MongoDB every once in a while and I think it is great. The C# driver has linq support which increases productivity to the roof. However, the feature I miss the most while using MongoDB is multi document transaction support. Their site provides a workaround[1] that from my point of view is not worth implementing. Instead I prefer to switch back to traditional SQL databases in those situations.

[1] http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/perform-two-phase-co...

nlavezzo• 13 years ago

You're not alone in this interest - we hear that as a pain point a lot. If you're really interested in this, keep an eye on this page:

https://foundationdb.com/layers

frostnovazzz• 13 years ago

A month ago I was contacted by a recruiter about some engineering opportunity. I was surprised to know that MongoDB gives me the feeling of Tech company like G or FB. I always thought of MongoDB as kind of an open source product. I started to learn how it operate as a business. I think this is a sign that enterprise-targeted business are rising, and there will be more and more of this kind of start ups in the future.

davidu• 13 years ago

Anyone have estimates what their revenue or run-rate is?

neovive• 13 years ago

Any recommendations for a good MongoDB book or course?

arkham• 13 years ago

The 2nd Edition of the MongoDB: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly is one I can recommend (full disclosure: I was a technical reviewer on that edition). http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028031.do

For basics, the Little MongoDB Book (http://openmymind.net/2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book/) is a bit dated at this stage, but a good starting point.

Finally, there are free MongoDB courses available at http://education.mongodb.com in various flavors of programming language, as well as an ops/DBA focused course.

joeblau• 13 years ago

Best MongoDB training I had was to be at a company where they throw it into production, it crashed almost every day and then we got 10Gen to train us on what was going on. I got experience and wisdom all in a very short time.

vdaniuk2• 13 years ago

Yep, mongodb is launching their own moocs https://education.mongodb.com

ateevchopra• 13 years ago

Congratulations to the team ! Finally hardwork they have done is paying off. Hope you will continue to make awesome fast databases like ever !

geertj• 13 years ago

Congrats to MongoDB. But for me they became pretty much irrelevant after PostgreSQL 9.1 added a JSON datatype.

gregwebs2• 13 years ago

Postgres 9.2 gives you the ability to index and query JSON, but you still can't atomically update portions of the JSON which is very limiting.

giulianob• 13 years ago

It seems 9.2 can solve a lot of use cases but when they have partial updates, I'll cry tears of joy.

postfuturist• 13 years ago

It's a common technique to serialize arbitrary data into blob fields in SQL databases--I've seen it for years. Usually, it is considered an anti-pattern. Postgres 9.1 doesn't do much other than verify the JSON data is valid JSON and then stores it unchanged, though successive versions are adding more first-class JSON support.

jameshart2• 13 years ago

I wonder to what extent the AGPL license actually facilitates the creation of a commercial business based on the software; large online service customers who would be willing to use even GPL software without paying anybody for it might be more likely to opt to negotiate a commercial license for AGPL code.

If that is the case, though, and their revenue model is based on providing non-AGPL access to MongoDB, doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL?

mason553• 13 years ago

doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL?

While the MongoDB product is open source and licensed under the AGPL, they very rarely accept outside contributions. A vast majority of the product was built by 10gen/MongoDB, so this is less of an issue than it would be for something like Postgres.

jameshart2• 13 years ago

Which seems like further evidence that the use of AGPL is somewhat disingenuous - more a poison-pill than a genuine attempt to embrace free software principles. If I use MongoDB, and modify it to suit my needs, I have to make my changes available to anyone who consumes a service I back with my modified MongoDB. MongoDB Inc., presumably by virtue of having licensing agreements in place with all the copyright holders whose code is in their core distribution of the product, have the ability not to do that. They could, however, examine my improvements and do a cleanroom reimplementation of them.

The real risk to them is that a vastly improved fork of MongoDB is built up by contributors who don't license over their contributions to MongoDB Inc., preventing their incorporation into commercial licensed versions...

bitdiddle• 13 years ago

I don't quite follow, in that all dual-licensed business models seem to be based on this exploitation? What's different about AGPL?

venus3• 13 years ago

Well let me be the first to say that I think that is an absolutely fucking crazy valuation and that MongoDB are either nuts or disingenuous for signing up for it.

I would be astounded - astounded - if MongoDB generate even a tenth of that, just in revenue, ever.

One point two billion dollars. You have got to be kidding me. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Confusion3• 13 years ago

Fortunately there is no startup bubble.

venus3• 13 years ago

Thank goodness for that! If there was, this development would be quite concerning.

pc5• 13 years ago

I hate to be That Guy, but I think this demands a bit more rigor. $1.2B is certainly a big number, but let's unpack what it means. Do you think it's impossible that MongoDB gets to $100M of net income? For a company that sells to the enterprise and whose product has significant adoption, that definitely doesn't sound implausible to me.

Given their financials and growth figures, how would you value MongoDB?

yo-mf• 13 years ago

Dear "That Guy", spot on.

venus3• 13 years ago

I don't know. I haven't seen these financials. But it's a frigging database, and not a particularly good one. A billion dollars!?

Look, I'm not claiming to be omniscient. I'm sure they're smart people. But would you buy stock in MongoDB at a 1.2b valuation? Would you?

As for me - Absolutely not.

tlogan2• 13 years ago

The value of MongoDB is how much Larry Ellison is willing to pay for them. That is that.

dbags• 13 years ago

More importantly, the number is utterly and completely meaningless without the rest of the term sheet.

To be extreme, think of the difference between this investment as all common stock, versus this investment as participating preferred with 3x liquidation preferences.

I've seen companies trade liquidation preferences for higher valuations before, because they wanted to pretend a down round wasn't, or because they wanted to feign a greater level of success than had been earned. It wouldn't be unprecedented, particularly from a marketing-savvy company like Mongo that knows a 3 comma valuation would help close deals.

codex2• 13 years ago

I'd agree. Open source businesses have never been able to extract the value that closed source business can. Imagine if Oracle made their database open source; a dozen repackages would pop up, and Oracle's revenue would drop to a fraction of its former level.

dblock• 13 years ago

Redhat? 8.54BB market cap.

brugidou• 13 years ago

As an engineer directly involved in a company working on one of the biggest mongodb deployments, i also believe that this is crazy because the technology truly sucks outside of a very narrow use case (prototyping, no shard).

However they market it so much and they accept very flexible deals with enterprises, in combination with the easy-to-bootstrap for the VP/Manager/CTO, they can probably sell a lot of it.

nasalgoat7• 13 years ago

They offer a deeply discounted option for startups and once you have lock-in (ie. running sharded, basically) and become dependent on the support, they increase the cost by 10x.

jfb• 13 years ago

Enterprise software deals are never closed on technical merit.

brudgers• 13 years ago

The investors are putting up capital based on what they think Mongo will be worth at some future date after they have used the new capital to fuel growth. It's a bet, not an accounting exercise, and the bet is based on what might happen five or more years down the road.

The valuation is really irrelevant because it is a side effect of the negotiations between a syndicate with $150 million to invest and a company looking to raise money.

If the investors had negotiated less successfully, the valuation would be higher. If the company had been less successful, the valuation would have been lower.

But in either of those scenarios there would be little difference in their returns if Mongo goes bust, and little difference if they become Oracle sized in the next ten years.

bane• 13 years ago

I bet In-Q-Tel is very happy with this. Between MongoDB and Palantir their recent investments have been doing really well.

epoxyhockey• 13 years ago

They have the easiest job in the world. They invest in a company, then have their deep-pocketed client buy services from that company.

jskonhovd• 13 years ago

add Digital Reasoning to that list very soon.

leokun• 13 years ago

Exciting to think what this might mean for RethinkDB some day. :)

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

These valuations makes joining MongoDB right now a very bad idea.

tolitius3• 13 years ago

Ok. Time to change how the hype and good marketing drive mediocre products, with average people behind it, to silly valuations.

So here it comes. It is only a VALUE if WE say it is. So here is what I say.

I value

    * Redis      @ $4.5B
    * Datomic    @ $4.5B
    * Riak       @ $3.2B
    * Hazelcast  @ $3.0B
    * HBase      @ $2.5B
    * Spanner    @ $2.1B
    * Neo4j      @ $2.0B
    * MongoDB    @ N/A

Congratulations to MongoDB sales and marketing team (really!). It is a tough job to sell a trojan horse to masses.

threeseed8• 13 years ago

Look clearly you have zero understanding of how enterprises work. And given you have added Hazelcast which is a distributed in-memory solution in there shows you have a poor understanding of technology as well.

It is all about support. Big companies have operations teams who manage infrastructure and deployments. They aren't experts in databases and so want to be able to ring someone who can help them when the times get tough. 10gen understands this and have a great support story to talk about hence their popularity. Most OSS don't.

tolitius3• 13 years ago

a simple fact that you get defensive and personal reveals that you are not happy with your confidence level. but that's ok, as you get more mature, and acquire a certain perception depth (and I wish you do), you'll prefer being constructive vs. angry.

I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Hazelcast solves similar problem that all of the valuations in the list: "storing and retrieving data". By the way, "file system" does it too (let's valuate it as well @ $3.6B).

As far as "enterprise support" in case of Mongo, it's like running a political campaign: nobody really knows "who" is inside, until "he" gets elected, and when "he" does, the "support" needs to make sure reality stays hidden, by white (and not so white) lies. And yes, MongoDB is great at "support", most OSS aren't.

mkhalil• 13 years ago

Whenever I see something like this, I can't help but think this is just a business deal. Nothing to do with technology. Rich business men are going to get richer because they can get away with over-valuing technology and tricking their non-tech savy investors into thinking this will make them a buttload. Some sort of quasi-pyramid scheme.

dpweb• 13 years ago

Not a fan of Mongo personally, but understand the context of what is happening in corporate IT. Slashing and commoditization. They look at the $10M line item for Oracle and say wait a minute.. The last section of the article was the most telling.. We replace the millions $ and staff with a $5000 server. Just like trading in your US employee for an offshore replacement at 1/5th the cost. They love that message.

Remember too, the quality of the tech is one factor (way down on the list) in decision making of what these companies buy.

As far as the tech, Relational DB is certainly not the problem and even if it was, Mongo wouldn't be the solution. Mongo's riding the wave of slash and burn, and Oracle has pissed on more than a few customers over the years, basically with the attitude.. "where you gonna go!" Any company gets a toe-hold in big companies like Mongo has gonna be looked on very favorably by Wall St right now..

Mongo will get bought for sure, the valuation is not that nuts.

hacknat• 13 years ago

This is crazy. If I had known that I could gin up money for a crappy database I would have written one. This seems unfair, but we'll be joking about this in 10-15 years.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

Now we could see how deceptive sales technologies and media manipulations are leading to ridiculous valuations instead of any new technologies or even appropriate (for a persistent storage engine) design decisions.

Still enjoying table-level locking on writes and lack of atomic writes in so-called transactions at $1,2B valuation?)

The same story as it was of MySQL prior to stabilized InnoDB (5.1.x) an extremely popular crap with table-level locks, silent data conversions and millions of ignorant 'satisfied customers'.

By the same logic PHP must be valued at one trillion - millions of satisfied cheap coders, and, you know, Facebook was written in it.)

MongoDB Raises $150 Million at $1.2 Billion Valuation

Related Stories