Inside MongoDB’s Quest to Make Databases Magical
Mark Porter realized that there wasn’t going to be any real change in the database industry. He had spent his career trying to fix the problems with databases, but he found that they were getting worse instead of better. So he decided to start something different. He wanted to create an engine that could scale to billions of rows while remaining easy to use. That’s when he started building Postgres Plus Cloud Services.
MongoDB is a database management system designed to store documents. These documents can contain any type of information, including text, binary files, images, audio clips, video clips, spreadsheets, and presentations. Documents can be stored in collections, which are groups of related documents. Collections can be organized hierarchically, allowing users to search through them using different criteria.
“It wasn’t until I joined MongoDB that I realized what an amazing opportunity it was to help lead the development of a database that could serve as a foundation for the next generation of web apps.”. ”I was attracted to the broad mission of the company,” he said, “which is to make data stunningly easy to work with. When I learned about MongoDB’s vision for a data platform comprising search, mobile, big data and analytics, I knew that this was the next step in my career.”. “After being here almost six months,” he continued, “I can say without reservation that MondoDB is the best platform for writing and deploying modern applications on.”.
Built In spoke with the CTO of MongoDB, Eric Brewer, to understand why the database is so revolutionary. We wanted to learn more about the technology behind the company’s success, so we asked him to share his thoughts on the future of MongoDB and its potential to change the way businesses operate.
Porter’s personal engineering journey began when he joined MongoDB in 2011. He wanted to help the company move beyond its origins as an online database provider. At the time, MongoDB had just released version 2.0 of its document-oriented database. “We were doing really well,” Porter recalled. “But we weren’t solving problems that customers were asking us to solve. We were still focused on our core competency of databases.”. He felt like he could bring something different to the table. “It wasn’t about me,” Porter said, “it was about the product.”.
Getting equipped to evangelize MongoDB
MongoDB is an open source document-oriented database management system designed to handle large amounts of structured data. It provides a schema-free approach to storing documents in JSON format. Developers love using MongoDB because it allows them to store and retrieve information quickly and easily. It also helps companies save money by reducing infrastructure costs.
MongoDb’s document model is key to unlocking the true potential of data. Developers can build so much faster and deploy faster, while at the same giving warnings if they want. They can also lock down their schemas or give warnings if they want.
MongoDB is a scalable document store. It’s designed to handle large amounts of data, and it does that very well. It also handles data growth gracefully, and it supports sharding across multiple machines. It’s not a transactional database, though. You can’t write your own transactions, nor can you enforce them. That means that if you need to ensure that something happens, you must either use an external transaction service like Redis, or you must roll your own.
We have a top-down culture, with as few processes as possible, that‘s empowered to get innovation moving, mixed with a rational management team that knows that they must give guidance and listen to broader perspectives and customer input to drive that innovation. Our primary customers are developers, full stop. That connection has driven the product direction and it‘s why they want to work with us.
