 Hello everybody, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. This is the first Mongo live MongoDB World since 2019. theCUBE has covered a number of Mongo shows, actually going back to when the company was called TenGen, some of you may recall. Mongo, since then, has done an IPO, they got an IPO in 2017. It's been a rocket ship company. It'll probably do 1.2 billion in revenue this year. It's got a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. Despite the tech lash, it's still got a $19 or $20 billion valuation growing above 50% a year. The company just had a really strong quarter and there seemed to be hitting on all cylinders. My name is Dave Vellante. And here to kick it off with me is Sanjeev Mohan who is the principal at Sanjimo. Sanjeev, great to see you. You've become a wonderful CUBE contributor, former Gartner analyst. Really sharp know the database space and the data space generally really well. So thanks for coming back on. You're welcome. You know, it's just amazing how exciting the entire data space is. It's like they used to say companies are, all companies are software companies. All companies are data companies. So data has become the foundation. Yeah, they say software is eating the world. Data is eating software. And so, a lot of little quips here. But this is a good sized show. If I have four, 5,000 people, I don't really know exactly the numbers, but it's exciting. Of course a lot of financial services were here at the Javits Center. Let's lay down the basics for people. MongoDB is a document database, but they've been advancing that. So document database is an alternative to RDBMS. Explain that, but explain also how Mongo has broadened its capabilities and serving a lot more use cases. Right, so that's my forte, is like databases technology. But before even I talk about that, I have to say I am blown away by this MongoDB world, because MongoDB unbeckoned to all of us during the pandemic has really come of age. And it's a billion dollar company now. We are in the brand new Javits Center that's been built during the pandemic. And now the company is holding this event. They hired 1,000 people last year. So I think this company has really grown. And why has it grown? Is because its offerings have grown to more developers than just a document database. Document databases revolutionized the whole DBMS space when no SQL came up because for a change you didn't need a structured schema. You could start bringing data in this document model schema, like varying schema. But since then, they've added things like search. So they have Lucene search. They added Geospatial. They added Time Series last year. And this year they keep adding more and more. So like for example, they're going to add some column store indexes. So from being a purely transactional, they are now starting to address analytical. And they're starting to address more use cases like what was announced this morning at keynote was faceted search. So they're expanding, they're going deeper and deeper into these other data structures. So they've taken Lucene and made it a search of first class citizen. But I want to ask you some basic questions about document database. So it's no fixed schema. So you put anything in there actually. So it's more data friendly. They're trying to simplify the use of data. Okay, that's pretty clear. What are the trade-offs of a document database? So it's not like one technology has solved every problem. Every technology comes with its own trade-offs. So in a document, you basically get rid of joining tables with primary foreign keys because you can have a flexible schema. And so within single document, so it's very easy to write and search. But when you have a lot of repeated elements and you start getting more and more complex, your document size can start expanding quite a bit because you're trying to club everything into a single space. So that is where the complexity goes up. So what does that mean for a practitioner? It means they have to think about what, how they are ultimately going to structure, how they're going to query so they can get the best performance. Is that right? So they got to put some time in up front in order to make it pay back at the tail end. But clearly it's working. But is that the correct way of thinking about it? 100%. In the SQL world, you didn't care about the SQL analytical queries, you just cared about how your data model was structured and then SQL would basically search any model. But in the no SQL world, you have to know your patterns before you invest into the database. So it's changed that equation where you come in knowing what you are signing up. So a couple of other questions if I can, kind of Colombo question. So Mongo talks about how it's really supporting mission critical applications. And at the same time, my understanding is the architecture of Mongo specifically or a document database in general, but Mongo specifically, you've got a primary database and that is the sort of the master, if you will, right? And then you can create secondaries. But so help me square the circle between mission critical and really maybe more of a focus on I'll say consistency versus availability. Do customers have to sort of think about and design in that availability? How do they do that? How are Mongo customers handling that? So I have to say my experience of MongoDB was that the whole company, the whole ethos was developer friendly. So to be honest, I don't think MongoDB was as much focused on high availability, disaster recovery, even security to some extent, they were more focused on developer productivity and use it here, simplicity. Make it simple, make the developers productive as fast as you can. What has really was an inflection point for MongoDB was the launch of Atlas. Because with Atlas, they were able to introduce all of these management features and hide it abstracted from the end users. So now they've got like 2014 is when Atlas came out and it was in four regions, but today they're in 100 regions. So they keep expanding then every hyperscale cloud provider and they've abstracted that whole management. Okay, so Atlas of course is the managed database, the database is a service in the cloud. And so it's that cloud infrastructure and cloud tooling that has allowed them to go after those high availability applications. My other question is, when you talk about adding search geospatial time series, there are a lot of specialized databases that take time series for instance. Do you have time series specialists that go deep into time series? Can a company like Mongo with an all in one strategy, how close can they get to that functionality? Do they have to be, it's kind of a classic Microsoft, maybe not perfect, but good enough. I mean, can they compete with those other areas, with those other specialists? And what happens to those specialists if the answer is yes? What's your take on that if that question makes sense? So David, this is not a MongoDB only issue. This is an issue with any time series database, any graph database. Should I put a graph database or should I put a multi-functional database, multi-dimensional database? And I really think there is no right or wrong answer. It just really comes down to your use case. If you have an extremely, let's say, complex graph, then maybe you should go with a best of breed, purpose-built database. But more and more we are starting to see that organizations are looking to simplify their environment by going in for maybe a unified database that has multiple data structures. Yeah, well it's certainly, it's interesting when you hear Mongo speak. They don't call out oracles specifically, but when they talk about legacy, RDBMS that don't scale and are complex and are inexpensive, they're talking about Oracle first and of course there are others. And then when they talk about the bespoke databases, the Horses for Courses databases, then they show a picture of that. That's like the poster child for Amazon. And of course they don't call out Amazon, they're a great partner of Amazon's. But those are really the sort of two areas that Mongo's going after. Now Oracle of course will talk about their converged strategy and they're taking a similar approach. But so help us understand the difference there is it just because they're sort of Oracle's traditional RDBMS and they have all the drawbacks associated with that, but by the way there are some benefits as well. So how do you see that all playing out? So you know it really, it's coming down to the origins of these databases. I think they're converging to a point where they are offering similar services. And if you look at some of the benchmark numbers or you talk to users, from a business point of view, I don't think there's too much of a difference, technology-wise. The difference is that MongoDB started in the document space. They were more interested in availability rather than consistency. Oracle started in the relational database with focus on financial services. So asset compliance is what they're based on. And since then they've been adding other pieces. So they differ from where they started. Oracle has been in the industry for some, since 1970s. So they have that maturity, but then they have that legacy. You know how I love it, because recently Oracle announced the MongoDB API. And so basically saying, why leave Oracle when you can just do the MongoDB? So that to me is a sign that MongoDB is doing well. Because if Oracle calls you out, whether you're Workday or Snowflake or Mongo, whoever, that's a sign to me that you've got momentum and you're stealing share in that marketplace. And clearly Mongo is, they're growing at 50 plus percent per year. So thinking about the earlier, I mentioned TenGen early on. I remember that one of the first conferences I went to, Mongo conferences, it was just, it was all developers, a lot of developers here as well. But they have really, since say 2014, expanded the capabilities. You talk about Atlas, you talked about all these other types of databases that they've added. If it seems like Mongo is becoming a platform company, what are your thoughts on that in terms of them sort of up leveling the message? They're now a billion dollar plus company. What's the next wave for Mongo? So Oracle announced MongoDB APIs, AWS has document DB, Azure has Cosmos DB. So they all have API compatible APIs, not the source code, because MongoDB has its own SSPL license. So they have written their own layer on top. But at the end of the day, these companies have to keep innovating to catch up with MongoDB. Because MongoDB can announce a brand new capability, then all these other players have to catch up. So other cloud providers have 80% or so of capabilities, but they'll never have 100% of what MongoDB has. So people who are diehard MongoDB fans, they prefer to stay on MongoDB. They are now able to write more applications, like MongoDB Baud Realm, which is the front end, if you're in social media kind of thing, you can build your applications and sync it with Atlas. So MongoDB is now at a point where they are adding more capabilities that more developers like 5G is coming, autonomous cars are coming. So now they can address IoT kind of use cases. So that's why it's becoming such a joggernaut because it's becoming a platform rather than a single document database. Yeah, so Atlas is the near to midterm future. Today it's about 60% of revenues, but they have what Mongo calls self-serve, which is really the traditional on-prem stuff. They're connecting those worlds. You're bringing up the point that, of course they go across clouds. They're also bringing up the point that they've got edge plays. We're going to talk to Verizon later on today and they've got edge activity going on with developers. I call it super cloud, right? This sort of layer that floats above. Now, of course a lot of the super cloud consensus is we're going to hide the underlying complexity, but for developers they might want to tap those primitives. So Mongo presumably will let them do that, but that hybrid, what we call super cloud, that is a new wave of innovation. Is it not? And do you agree with that? And do you see that as a real opportunity for Mongo in terms of penetrating a new TAM? Yes, so I see this is a new opportunity. In fact, one of the reasons MongoDB has grown so quickly is because they are addressing more markets than they had pre-pandemic. Also, there are all gradations of users. Some users want full control, they want an IaaS kind of, someone pass, and some businesses are like, you know, we don't care. We don't want to deal with the database. So today we heard MongoDB serverless went GA. So now they have serverless capability, they have pass, but if you're more into Kubernetes, they have Kubernetes operator. So they're addressing the full stack of different types of developers, different workloads, different geographical regions. So that's why the market is expanding. Yeah, we're seeing abstraction layers, you know, throughout the start of the physical, virtual containers, serverless, and eventually super cloud. Sanjeev, great analysis. Thanks so much for taking your time to come on theCUBE. All right, keep it right there. We'll right back right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante from the Javits Center at MongoDB World 2022.