MongoDB
I highly recommend Justin Gage’s “Technically” newsletter if you’re interested in understanding some of the new technology trends better.
Justin does a great job of making the mechanics of the new shifts in technology a lot easier to understand.
He focuses on a wide range of areas including APIs, cloud, cybersecurity, big data, IT infrastructure, emerging companies in their respective sectors like Segment, Databricks, UIpath and many other areas.
Here is a link to Justin’s Technically newsletter:
https://technically.substack.com/
In this summary, I will be summarizing Justin’s post on MongoDB.
Here is the link to Justin Gage’s article “What does MongoDB do?”
https://technically.substack.com/p/what-does-mongodb-do
And here is my summary below:
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MongoDB is a document database for powering applications.
A document database is a series of values and keys.
Almost all apps use a production database to function.
Some of the largest companies in the world use MongoDB to help allow their apps to function.
MongoDB's cloud product, Atlas, has been growing all over the place and now represents more than 50% of their revenue.
MongoDB built a lot of supporting products around their document database and this made their product much better and led to more user growth.
Atlas has built a great product to use (Justin just tried it for a simple project and said that setting it up and using it was smooth and free) which has been a major reason for their huge growth and Atlas can also be hosted on any of the big three cloud players - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
The tailwind of many companies transitioning their IT infrastructure to the cloud has led to a lot of growth for MongoDB as well.
Some offerings that MongoDB has with their database are enterprise, backup, monitoring and cloud but they make the majority of their revenue from managed services like hosting your database.
In order to fully understand what MongoDB does, you need to understand what NOSQL is.
NOSQL is a database that isn’t structured. This is in contrast to SQL which is a category of mini-programming languages for structured databases.
NOSQL databases are a lot harder to query in because the data isn’t organized meanwhile SQL databases are easier to query in because the data is more organized.
For example, two people with different names, age and height would be stored in a NOSQL database because the data types (Matt, John, 50 years old, 10 years old, 6'2", 4'1") in this case don’t match.
The most popular type of NOSQL database is called document store and that is how MongoDB works.
MongoDB is trying to be the go-to-place for data by offering some other product lines such as realm, realm sync, charts and atlas data lake.
They're also trying to brand themselves more on being a good database to developers and less on NOSQL based on what their current website says.