MongoDB CTO Discusses The Database Evolution

What is your company doing to make its products more appealing to customers?

There are a few things we’re good at. We’re good at listening to our users. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is that I’m a developer. I get to make tools for developers. We have lots of empathy for our users. We’re user focused so people appreciate that.

That makes them happy because we’re adding things that they care about. The business is growing very well, which lets us execute well on our fundamentals. If the business isn’t going well you can’t really hire a lot of people. You’ve got to focus on how to make the business work.

But if the business is going well you can hire a lot of people, keep growing, focus on new business opportunities as well as your core user base. You can only do that if you’re successful. I think our core product is quite good and quite popular, which lets us continue to reinvest in the product over and over again.

What’s the availability of 3.4 and have you received any feedback on it?

It’s officially released in two weeks, but there is already a version publicly available. We’ve had quite a bit of feedback. We have an extensive data program and we always get quite a lot of feedback from our developer community. There will always be patches and bug fixes available annually but 3.4 is really done.

What do you see as being the next step for MongoDB?

If you look at the next year, for example, there will be a huge focus on Atlas and that will continue to evolve. I think there will be a big focus on things like distributed systems, transactions and things in that space. I think there will be more focus on language, aggregation and search features.

And there will be a focus on making the analytics inside of MongoDB even more powerful so you don’t need to worry about synchronising data between multiple sources.

Quiz: What do you know about databases?