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Open source company MongoDB wants to make sure that the type of database you chose doesn’t get in they way of building the applications you need. ZDNet spoke to the company’s co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz at the recent Big Data LDN conference in Olympia, London.
ZDNet: What was the original idea that led to MongoDB?
Horowitz: The decade before we started Mongo, Dwight [Merriman] and myself were building database products and we invariably had to work around databases. What actually happened was that we were thinking about some new application that we were going to build and we realised that we were going to have to work around database problems almost immediately. We started designing the database so that it would service the application.
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We quickly realised that the database was actually more interesting than the application that we were going to build and so we sat down and designed the database that we always wanted. Rather than build these four clustered databases for each application, we thought why don’t we just build the database that we wished we had had for our entire careers.
And we went off and built it.
What attributes did the database need that you thought essential?
We thought it has to be based around documents. It has to be document-centric with all the good features of relational databases so it had to have a good query language, indexing and lots of other good things. We laid out a spec.
First, it had to be based around documents and not just tables and rows
Two, it had to be used to build good systems, so things like high availability and charting and so on, had to be features.
And three, it had to be open source and run everywhere. We didn’t want to be stuck on a platform that was going nowhere. At the time the cloud hadn’t got started but it was pretty obvious that it was going to happen.
The open source choice was absolutely deliberate?
Yes. It’s my belief that there will never be another piece of systems software that isn’t open source. Open source gives you freedom and it also gives you better software. People look at the software, find bugs and get patches and build a better solution.
So you were getting started and were up and running, what were the key moments in your progress?