[Tech] The Origin of MongoDB - Dwight Merriman

**Swyx** (0:00)
Today, we're going for a straight down the middle origin story, and this origin story is of MongoDB, the very successful open-source NoSQL database. Well, open-source with an asterisk, and they talk about it towards the end of the episode.
This comes from the MongoDB podcast, which I think I've featured it before, but they've just very well-run podcast by Mike Lin, because it's someone's full-time job, and it's very unusual to see it executed so well. I definitely had picked it as one of the best data podcasts out there. If you want to check out the full list, you can check out the AirBite blog with, just look for the staff picks data podcasts, and you'll see it.
Anyway, so here's the origin story on MongoDB. It's how did you start the company? How did you start MongoDB?

**Dwight Merriman** (0:44)
Right, so when we started, actually, the name of the company was TenGen, and this was around 2008, or I forget the date, maybe two months before that, I can't remember. The original, what we were really looking at the time is myself and our other co-founders, like Elliot and Kevin. We've been working on various entrepreneurial projects, and just we were seeing this repeated pattern where over and over, new product idea. You start building the system. At this point, I've been doing that for quite a long time, so kind of knew what the best practices were at the time, but it was always around that time frame, 2000, January 2008, whenever it was.
It just seemed like it was always a bit awkward. There was awkward and un-aesthetic, and it just seemed like there was a lot of duct tape and rubber bands, and even though those were best practices, right? You know, you would talk to CTOs at the time, you know, and they would say things like, you know, putting Memcached in front of databases is okay, and roll your own sharding in front of MySQL or Postgres is okay, but it sort of isn't. It was because it wasn't a better way at the time, and you know, everything was, that was really when cloud computing, EC2 was really taking off, so it was very clear to us that cloud computing was the future, and a lot of the traditional products weren't very cloud-friendly. So if you have a database that scales vertically, right, so I can make it bigger, but you know, then it's a mainframe or a Sun 6500 or something like that, it's like, that's kind of the opposite of some, a cloud principle with just kind of like horizontal scalability and elasticity, right? And then if you tried to do it the other way horizontally, it was usually kind of rolling your own when it came to operational databases.
And a lot of other things, but also just agile development was the way to go then, all the, you know, iterative development, but a lot of the old tools, and this isn't just databases, but languages, everything, weren't really designed for that because they were invented earlier, so it's not their fault. So we were just saying like, gee, there's gotta be a better way to develop applications. And this is both on how to develop them, how to code them, and also on how to scale them and how to run them in the cloud painlessly. So our first concept was just, we were gonna do platform as a service. So we were gonna try to make a, do a fresh take on the developer stack, you know, versus LAMP and whatever else was common then, and see what we could come up with. So we were, we started building a platform as a service system, it was open source.
And this was very early. So it was, I think when we went to beta, it was almost exactly the same time that Google's, was it Google App Engine?

**Swyx** (4:02)
Yeah.

**Dwight Merriman** (4:03)
It's the same time it came out to beta. So like our timing was, it was like when they came out with it, I was like, oh, okay, we're thinking, somebody there is thinking some of my thoughts. And so that was fine. And then, but a few months later, as we got a little further into it, I was thinking about it, and I was like, I'm looking at things like AWS, where they have all these microservices, and they're sort of like, I'm not gonna give you a full cloud platform, I'm gonna give you some building blocks for your toolbox, and over time, I'll give you more.
Because the scope is large, so today they have a lot of services, but this, we're kind of 15 years later-ish. So if I give you a platform, though, it's sort of, to give you everything you need, really, it's a big scope, and it's gonna take quite a while to build it.