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Databases Oracle Businesses IT

MongoDB CEO Claims They're Luring Customers From Oracle (diginomica.com) 153

Posted by EditorDavid from the data-on-databases dept.
"MongoDB is increasingly encroaching on Oracle's database lead -- with enterprises becoming more and more confident with the maturing NoSQL technology," according to Diginomica, citing this new interview with CEO Dev Ittycheria: 30% of our business is migration off existing workloads to us. Two years ago it was 5%. Ditching Oracle and others, but mainly Oracle... one of the nice benefits of being in this market is that Oracle has done a great job of alienating its customer base... if there are performance reasons, regulatory reasons, developer demand -- [people] will change... We have grown business by 2.5X over last two years. And our employee base has pretty much doubled.
One reason he cites is Oracle's higher prices on their top-line products, saying MongoDB's new customers include "a large bank, whose logo you would recognize instantly [with] a very sophisticated equities trading platform." Ittycheria says MongoDB is now a nine-figure business, and after they launched their new database-as-a-service product Atlas last June, "the growth in that business has been off the charts."
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MongoDB CEO Claims They're Luring Customers From Oracle More

MongoDB CEO Claims They're Luring Customers From Oracle

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  • Sounds about right for a buyout, no?

  • ACID doesn't matter... (Score:3)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Saturday November 19, 2016 @11:47AM (#53321921)

    "ACID doesn't matter... your first install is free!"

  • could just be the beginning (Score:4, Informative)

    by sribe ( 304414 ) on Saturday November 19, 2016 @12:03PM (#53321969)

    From my experience, I'd guess that about 90% of Oracle installations do not need Oracle. They're all ripe for migration to PostgreSQL or MongoDB. (Granted the 10% of installations that are big enough to need Oracle will be way more than 10% of Oracle's database revenue, but it's still a nice market segment, ripe for the taking.)

    • If Mango can produce enough revenue, Oracle will make them an offer they can't refuse. In the meantime, they can let them (Mango) do all the dirty work of gathering clients.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        Mongo, not Mango

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Mongo just pawn in game of life.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sribe ( 304414 )

        If Mango can produce enough revenue, Oracle will make them an offer they can't refuse. In the meantime, they can let them (Mango) do all the dirty work of gathering clients.

        While that's true, I would hope that they might also get an offer from Amazon or IBM, or even Microsoft...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      But orgs don't want the extra expense of staffing and training between multiple brands, and migrating back and forth between them as needs change, such as a small database growing large and vice versa. One-stop-shopping simplifies all this.

      I'd suggest picking no more than two brands for an org: one high-end and one low-end. You'd probably want the option of ACID for both, which makes no-sql solutions a problem.

      • Care to point out which NoSQL DBs are not ACID, that would be helpful.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          Maybe I haven't been keeping up, but they lose lots of their original advantages by doing such.

          • Why would they?
            What has the question if a DB is relational and uses SQL or is non/Relational aka non/SQL aka NoSQL to do with any of the four letters in ACID?

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Tablizer ( 95088 )

              Is this a terminology question or an existing product question? I didn't name the products.

              • You are the one who started by "claiming" NoSQL would be non ACID ... so up to you if it is a terminology question.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      From my experience, I'd guess that about 90% of Oracle installations do not need Oracle.

      True, but many Oracle customers turn into all-Oracle shops because the DBAs claim it's the "enterprise quality" solution that they can get for a pittance more on top of the already expensive contract - not to mention a vested self interest - and the executives see the costs of managing an Oracle database environment and fear that they'll be hit with another huge bill. And that drives a lot of software to support installation on Oracle and so the circle is complete.

      I've worked with Oracle and when it works "

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hattig ( 47930 )

        Exactly. If your company can afford a DBA team, then Oracle is an option. This will likely keep the money rolling in to Oracle for the foreseeable future.

        If your company can't afford a DBA team, then you really need to look elsewhere, where-ever that may be (IMO PostgreSQL and Cassandra, maybe MongoDB, maybe ElasticSearch stack) and do a short period of trialing / proof-of-concepting to see what works best. However in this case one suggested recommendation is that you choose ONE company-wide SQL solution an

    • From my experience, I'd guess that about 90% of Oracle installations do not need Oracle.

      I'll go one step beyond that: in my experience, 99% of Oracle installations could be replaced with SQLite, MySQL, Firebird, even Derby. (Possibly Excel, in some cases)

      Virtually every Oracle DB I have encountered has used the POWER of Oracle (TM) as an excuse to skip putting together a decent schema. Massive duplication of data. Joining dozens of tables to get commonly needed data. Tables with far too many fields.

      I'm currently dealing with one that works ... just. Minor issues, like virtually every tabl

      • 99% of Oracle installations could be replaced with SQLite

        Ah no. sqlite can't even handle my little embedded applications because it falls over when accessed from more than one process at a time. I have seen a webapp with an openoffice back end. Works surprisingly well.

        • Yeah, I kinda threw that in as a complaint, but you're absolutely right: it doesn't support concurrent processing very well at all. Then again, I've seen one installation where it was used only to pull info during the day, and updated (batch) at night. They simply created a couple dozen copies of the database itself. Which isn't all that different than one of the Oracle options. Although, in this case, the developer put a tricky little bit in, so each DB had one user at a time. Insane, and not particu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yenya ( 12004 )

        I agree with your post. Just a minor nitpick:

        > Massive duplication of data. Joining dozens of tables to get commonly needed data

        You are contradicting yourself, aren't you? Keeping the schema in the normal forms means adding more joins to the queries.

    • I would bump that up to 100%. The only times I have used Oracle in my career (which would be about 50 times) was when a client said something stupid like, "We are an Oracle House, do you use Oracle?" Then after I would swallow my vomit, I would show them a list of all the clients where I used Oracle.

      Not once in my entire life have I even thought, "Oracle would be best for this." It would be like looking at my flowers in the garden and thinking, "They would grow better if I threw butter at them."

      If you

  • Inappropriate customers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm guessing that the Oracle customers that are most easily convered are those who shouldn't have been using oracle in the first place.

  • Oracle != Mongo (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19, 2016 @12:06PM (#53321987)

    Mongo is NoSQL, it can't steal business from Oracle at a large scale as processes would have to be completely rewritten to use NoSQL....and while the new setup would be faster, it would lose transactions and the ability to roll them back, among other things.

    • BINGO! This is what the original poster doesn't get by making such a ridiculous claim. Now, I'm all for Mongo and use it myself but NoSQL has it's place but anyone that knows anything about enterprise scale apps, security and transactions knows that SQL and NoSQL are worlds apart.

      Soon well be seeing headlines with "This is the Year of NoSQL" which remind me of the flavor of the month "This the year of the Linux desktop" or "This is the Year of Ruby on Rails with Gems" failed attempts to detrone the kings
    • NoSQL just seems loosey-goosey to me. Usually structure is there for a reason. How can a hundred people in an organization work on a database that can change on a whim by any one of them?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hattig ( 47930 )

        Why are hundreds of people working on the same objects directly? That's screaming for a microservice interface on top for the 95% who are doing the same operations. And then suddenly the underlying system doesn't matter.

        Most NoSQL solutions have a structure to the documents (because in the end they're serialised forms of Java/C#/etc objects), it's just that it isn't columnar. There can be arrays, inlined sub-objects, etc. And you can set indexes on these deeper aspects, and so on. The DB is optimised for tw

    • NoSQL DBs don't lose transactions and while they are in the process of doing one, they can roll back as any other DB can. Otherwise it would not be a DB ... get a clue.

  • No troll, just the facts relating to me.

    It time for me to run Win7 as a VM OS (I can fresh install my Win7 as often as I want -on this computer, and my numbers don't go over ( those added for each upgrade). This with Linux Mint (cinnamon).

    Did the research and Virtualbox was the software I went with as it met my every need https://www.virtualbox.org/ [virtualbox.org]. While it cost nothing up front, I'm into Oracle now.

    • Did the research and Virtualbox was the software I went with as it met my every need

      I take it you're not expecting a video driver that works worth a damn.

      • I say fu Oracle, every time I use Virtualbox. I has bugs but it does what I want. I find that VMWare molests my machine in ways that make me unhappy.

        • I say fu Oracle, every time I use Virtualbox. I has bugs but it does what I want. I find that VMWare molests my machine in ways that make me unhappy.

          Well it would appear I was the only one who didn't know, I dropped windows, win7 are for those times windows has to be used, yet Wine seems to do just fine, Agent Ransack is the only must have program of mine that just won't even try to install,

          But I'm enjoying playing around with Linux Mint (cinnamon), that's my game now, getting those applications running that just don't want to, Auth2DB at the moment.

      • Did the research and Virtualbox was the software I went with as it met my every need

        I take it you're not expecting a video driver that works worth a damn.

        Two thing here I have an old hauppauge video capture card I plan on ripping CD's with - it uses RCA jacks, this from FreeDos who has a driver for it.

        I have VT-d for VM, it lets the VM'd OS have directed I/O access to the Video card, hard drives, and network

    • If you didn't have to consult a lawyer and sign a few contracts, then you didn't "buy into" Oracle.

    • For an individual, or even a small organisation, you can even get a fully functional copy of Oracle's database - Oracle Database 11g Express Edition - for free.

      Of course, its when you want to scale, or if you need enterprise support, that the costs start piling up.
      • Piling up is not the half of dealing with Oracle. I would have my local used car dealership blindly handle my personal finances before I would deal with an Oracle sales person again.

  • There's going to be a knife's-edge of difference between SQL and NoSQL databases in 5-10 years. Queries are being added to NoSQL databases, and JSON navigation/indexing is being added to SQL databases. Evaluating them in terms of performance, ease-of-use, and standards is going to be time-consuming.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ADRA ( 37398 )

      Both exist. Well, XML navigation into SQL, but same-ish difference. There are a laundry list of SQL drivers pasted over NOSQL equivalents.

      The only problem is there's no universal ODBC / SQL that can just work accross all architectures. SQL has warts and is effective at a specific philosophy of data architecture, but it was a universal standard for decades, making the problem domain relatively simple to embrace. There's no standard that 99% of the dev's out there can use and embrace out of box, which will ju

  • One consultancies business model could have been cynically described as "Feast on E?S divisions' former clients in the energy industry." Feast we did.

    It was a good business model for the same reason noSQL strategy is good. Nobody likes repeated financial sodomy by smug suits who don't deliver, we're looking at you Oracle marketing.

    On the other hand, the JavaScript everywhere model is just silly. Storing _everything_ as JavaScript JSON objects makes at much sense as storing _everything_ as XML objects d

  • OK, I'm not a DBA (IANADBA? Hmm, I like the sound of that, 'yanadba', which syllable to put the accent on though.)

    But, really, why do corporations not use postgres? Is it some inherit deficiency in the product? A general antipathy to Open Source? Lack of publicity and marketing on the part of Postgres? Nobody from the company to hold the customer's hand when they first get it? (In that case, maybe there needs to be a Red Hat Postgres) Or something else?

    • OK, I'm not a DBA (IANADBA? Hmm, I like the sound of that, 'yanadba', which syllable to put the accent on though.)

      But, really, why do corporations not use postgres? Is it some inherit deficiency in the product? A general antipathy to Open Source? Lack of publicity and marketing on the part of Postgres? Nobody from the company to hold the customer's hand when they first get it? (In that case, maybe there needs to be a Red Hat Postgres) Or something else?

      Honestly, it may be a bit of everything, but I'll share my own personal anecdote...

      I used to provide desktop and network support to a relatively small insurance company (about a hundred employees). Their line-of-business application that handled everything from claims to brokers to billing was coded and maintained by a firm who built the product on an Oracle backend. It's a relatively small Oracle installation - $90,000/year was the number I remember hearing, which is obviously peanuts for an Oracle install

  • Why did he have to comment and get on Oracle's radar?

  • At minimum, transactions and eventual consistency are two reasons why you'd want SQL over NoSQL. Personally I also think that a good SQL schema would allow for faster queries on a single host than schemaless NoSQL would on multiple hosts.

  • I have never seen mongo run happily on its own for more than a week at a time. It has to be coddled and administered by hand. Automatic restarts are a necessity,

    So no, its not challenging Oracle right now,

  • When what's in the database is directly related to $$$, like account balances, financial transactions, hard asset tracking, billing, SSNs, payroll, and legal compliance, you use a serious tool like Oracle. Would you trust your paycheck being deposited into your bank account correctly to MongoDB? MySQL? Postgres? Not to say you can't try to do it with those tools, but with Oracle, you can be pretty much guaranteed that even if all your data centers simultaneously sink into the ocean, you can recover your fin
    • This is like the old BS about "Nobody was ever fired for using IBM" well Oracle is about the same as all the rest. The only time any of the major DBs lose data is during some crazy edge case. Server A was on fire, Server B had a HD failure on the raid and a bug in the raid slowed the whole system to a crawl, and C it was superbowl night and this was a NFL score keeping site.

      When I do mission critical data storage, I don't just kind of throw it into any DB and hope for the best. There are logs, logs, and m

    • use flat files

      ...or redis but then I repeat myself.

  • I can't say just how much I hate MongoDB. I love NoSQL but MongoDB is made up of the most arrogant assholes to have walked the internet. Maybe Twitter was more Arrogant but I dealt with twitter less. Oracle will rip you wallet out through your asshole but at least the DB is all about just shoving data in, and taking data out. Not telling you that you should alphabetize your fields or some OCD shit that is all about telling me how to do my job.

    MongoDB makes all this noise about how it is about freedom. It
  • I spent months trying to give them millions in license fees. Our millions weren't enough to deal with corporate, so we were directed to third parties. After months of being shit on, we transitioned our entire backend architecture. They could have had their name on some major big-ass product launch, but no. We weren't giving them at least $250m per year. Dealing with Oracle is a bullshit experience. If any Oracle customer could move onto Excel or even text files, they would in an instant. The levels of shit

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