
With $42M more, 10gen wants to take MongoDB mainstream - znq
http://gigaom.com/cloud/with-42m-more-10gen-wants-to-take-mongodb-mainstream/
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kisstheblade
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
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
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.

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zzzeek
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
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?

~~~
rozza
I ended up sharding my mug :(

~~~
reitzensteinm
Despite their claims, MongoDbMug is clearly not web scale.

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stock_toaster
Cut a hole in the bottom. You can put _tons_ of stuff in there now! ;)

note: be sure to hold it over the sink while 'filling'

~~~
reitzensteinm
Ah, the pipe to /dev/null solution. Now _that_ is web scale.

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trustfundbaby
> 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.

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

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

~~~
gaius
That's a web scale investment!

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kayoone
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
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).

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systemizer
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
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.

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

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dasil003
I was going to say "why, were they paid in Bitcoin?" but then I thought this
story was a bit too meme-heavy already.

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Ricapar
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
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
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?

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Irishsteve
How long before Oracle buy them

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

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hogu
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.

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

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amalag
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
And because Clustrix is only available via an appliance.

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

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wamatt
Would love to know what valuation, they raised at.

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taligent
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.

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luigi
Marketing it as a viable alternative seems right to me:

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

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

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gdw2
Version 2.2: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013953>

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fennecfoxen
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.

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milkshakes
not sure what you're going on about.. what you're characterizing as "punting"
to the OS was a carefully thought through decision, along the same vein as the
one phk of FreeBSD and Varnish fame made[1]

[1]: <https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes>

~~~
moe
_carefully thought through decision_

Varnish is a carefully tuned piece of machinery that consciously leverages the
page cache because that happens to be a great fit for the access pattern that
you'd expect in a _cache_.

Mongo is not a cache. It generates quite a different access pattern and it's
widely documented what happens when your working-set exceeds RAM or when you
put it under anything but the lightest write-load. A single bulk update
literally halts the world.

Comparing Varnish to MongoDB is quite an insult, akin to comparing a Swiss
precision Rolex to a plastic Mickey Mouse watch "with many advanced secret-
agent features" from a gumball machine.

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sylvinus
Bravo!

