Why MongoDB is ‘fundamentally better’ for developers
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah — OK, mountains of it — to invent a new kind of database and assume it will take over the world. Or maybe not assume, exactly, but, as MongoDB co-founder Eliot Horowitz put it in an interview, “If anyone was going to do it, we had just about the best chance of anyone out there.”
Not Oracle, with its decades of dominance in relational databases (RDBMS). Not IBM, with a waning database business but hordes of talented engineers. Not Microsoft, which had breathed new life into the RDBMS world with SQL Server. Not even open source upstarts MySQL and the increasingly popular PostgreSQL.
No, it was Horowitz and Dwight Merriman, two New Yorkers who wanted to put a new spin on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) but somehow, instead, built a database. “The database world is forever changed because of what we did,” said Horowitz, which might sound arrogant except for the fact that it’s true. Why it’s true, however, is worth diving deep to understand.