
MongoDB has filed confidentially for IPO - abhi3
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/15/database-provider-mongodb-has-filed-confidentially-for-ipo/?ncid=rss
======
leothekim
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.

~~~
meowface
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
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.

~~~
mattmanser
To be fair to them, it wasn't just them, it was everyone.

~~~
keithwhor
To be more fair to them, it was just them and the "everyone" you're referring
to was a result of a fantastic blatant + guerilla marketing campaign. Or maybe
I should say a MEAN success? :)

~~~
mikekchar
It may seem like that from a certain perspective, but I remember drowning in
the hype in 1992. It was going to be the next big thing: everything is going
C++; you want objects; why would you store relational tables, when you want
objects?; relational databases are just slow, clunky and complicate your code
base. The company I was working at even tried it... very briefly :-)
Unfortunately, I don't remember what we tried, but there were several around
at the time. This stuff wasn't invented by MongoDB.

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myth_drannon
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.

~~~
dsmithatx
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.

~~~
qaq
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.

~~~
DenisM
Good point. How is it possible to move that much data from SAN to mongo
cluster in such a short time window?

~~~
qaq
and rewrite and validate all the code that was accessing MySQL to use MongoDB

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hendzen
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.

~~~
vqc
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).

~~~
hendzen
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.

~~~
vqc
Are you sure Twilio or Nutanix didn't file confidentially before its S-1 was
flipped public? I'm actually not sure if there's a way to tell, other than a
leak.

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

[https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

~~~
kuschku
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](http://i.imgur.com/Thk5DlU.png)

~~~
elvinyung
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.)

~~~
kuschku
The benchmark measures almost exclusively read performance, so that's not
really a question.

Now the real question is why mongodb isn't faster than postgresql in this
test. MongoDB gives so many guarantees up just to get more performance, and
then looses to PostgreSQL? This is the worst trade deal in the history of
trade deals.

~~~
elvinyung
Oh oops, totally misread "read" as "write" :P

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jaequery
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.

~~~
patrickfreed
>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
>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.

~~~
nailer
Passing the Jepsen tests mean they'd say they're addressing the larger part of
that market, rather than document stores specifically.

(I still think MongoDB, the company, isn't particularly great for the usual
reasons re their past behaviour, I'm just imagining what they'd tell their
investors)

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noncoml
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.

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

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berberous
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.

~~~
notyourwork
Thanks for this information.

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a13n
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.

~~~
rpeden
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
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?

~~~
ezrast
Check out RethinkDB, a competing product which had exactly this happen earlier
this year. I don't follow the project closely, but the Linux Foundation picked
up stewardship and development appears to be continuing, if at a reduced pace.

MongoDB is pretty popular, so while it would certainly be disruptive in the
short term for the sponsoring company to go out of business, continued
community development is all but assured.

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flavio81
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.

~~~
dajohnson89
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.

~~~
flavio81
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://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-
mongodb/)

[http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-
ne...](http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-never-ever-
ever-use-mongodb/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9912842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9912842)

[http://developer.olery.com/blog/goodbye-mongodb-hello-
postgr...](http://developer.olery.com/blog/goodbye-mongodb-hello-postgresql/)

[https://www.andreas-jung.com/contents/goodbye-mongodb](https://www.andreas-
jung.com/contents/goodbye-mongodb)

~~~
dajohnson89
So what do you recommend instead?

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

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nodesocket
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](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas)

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

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chirau
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

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

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

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gaius
Now we know for certain that we are in a bubble

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arrty88
Get ready for another SNAP!

~~~
BinaryIdiot
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.

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perseusprime11
Will meet similar fate like Twitter, Snapchat...

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

~~~
perseusprime11
I am not comparing them but simply predicting the fate based on overblown
expectations that were similar to Twitter and SnapChat.

~~~
bdcravens
I think it's easy to equate, because in our bubble we hear so much Mongo hype,
but to the much larger world, they know as much about Mongo as they do
Firebase or New Relic. Also, Mongo the technology has a different set of
expectations than Mongo the publicly traded company.

