Genuine question: I appreciate the comments about MongoDB being much better than it was 10 years ago; but Postgres is also much better today than then as well. What situations is Mongo better than Postgres? Why choose Mongo in 2025?
I understand the criticisms, but in my experience, MongoDB has come a long way. Many of the earlier issues people mention have been addressed. Features like sharding, built-in replication, and flexible schemas have made scaling large datasets much smoother for me. It’s not perfect, but it’s a solid choice.
For context, I am a startup founder, an Atlas user, and not what anyone would call a "major account". I'm also in my early 30's, so I wasn't around for the whole "web scale" meme era of MongoDB.<p>I have personally been incredibly impressed with the way MongoDB has "looked out" for my company over the past year. I'll try to be satisfactorily specific their with privacy in mind, so this may come out a bit fuzzy. Their technical teams, both overseas and US, have produced some of the most thorough, detailed recommendations I have ever seen and their communication/followup was excellent. I've run many designs and ideas by their team, out of habit at this point, and have always been pleased with the response. They remember who I am. All of this is really unusual for a company at my growth stage.<p>My use case requires full technical depth on text searching and vectorization; I use every aspect of Atlas Search that is available. A downside of building "bleeding edge" is that my tooling needs always seem to be just inches beyond what is available, so just about every release seems to have something that is "for me." It's hard to say if my feedback specifically has an impact on their roadmap - but they really do seem to build things I want. I think they reported ~50% better performance on bulkWrite() in the 8 release, but it was closer to 500% for my use case.<p>Speaking of, this acquisition is like providence for me, because I've shared my various solutions with them for synchronously vectorizing "stuff" for use with local LLMs. It's a reasonably hard technical problem without a lot of consensus on standards; I think a lot of people believe there are standards, yet any discussion will quickly devolve into something like the "postgres/mongo" conversations you see here (I won't be visiting that topic).<p>I strongly agree with the "this should be a database level feature" approach they are taking here; that's certainly how my brain wants to think about it and currently I have to do a lot of "glue"-ing to make it work the way I require.<p>I hope they win.
Bloomberg says it was a $220M cash & stock deal: <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/mongodb-buys-voyage-ai-for-220-million-to-bolster-ai-search" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/mongodb-b...</a>
10x exit in a couple years, quite nice on the VC side!<p>On the tech side ... no idea what Mongo's plan is ... their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025.<p>I think the value is on Voyage's team, their user base and having a vision that aligned with Mongo's.<p>Congrats!
Only skimmed through the release..I hope they continue supporting the API but it comes with a little higher confidence that the company behind it is not collecting all your data. Voyage has some interesting embedding models that I have been hesitant to fully utilize due to the lack of confidence in the startup behind it.
How is MongoDB still a thing when there's already several ways to handle json in Postgres including Microsofts new documentdb extension:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f06dbb#nosql" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f...</a><p>What am I missing? Are Mongo users simply front end folks who didn't have time to learn basic SQL or back end architecture?
what's the calculus here? if i'm a developer choosing a low-level primitive such as a database, i'm likely quite opinionated on which models i use.
I'm actually very disappointed about the performance of Mongo vector search after I test on it.
Any vector database, is better than mongodb performance wise.