Hacker News Reader

Comment by leothekim | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

> early on the message they conveyed was that document databases were here to replace RDBMSs.

The CTO still thinks so. Quote[0]: "MongoDB's CTO disagrees with this statement arguing that nearly 90% of database installations today would benefit from being replaced with MongoDB"

[0]: https://www.nemil.com/mongo/2.html

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

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? :)

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.

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

I thought filsystems popularised document stores ;-)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com