Maintenance Amazon’s DocumentDB database service is described by the cloud company as “MongoDB compatible,” but MongoDB chief technical officer Mark Porter said The register this is not quite the case.
Mark Porter, CTO of MongoDB at AWS Re: invent
DocumentDB is used to store, query, and index JSON data and its fully qualified name on AWS is “Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)”.
We were curious to learn more about the differences between MongoDB and DocumentDB, so we sat down with Porter at the Re: invent conference in Las Vegas.
“It’s not compatible with MongoDB,†Porter said. “This is untruth … it is 34% compatible, across our testing. More importantly, for our users and customers, it is not compatible in all the ways that make MongoDB magical.
“There is no aggregation, there is no flow of changes, there are not as many languages; it is a ‘Frankenbase’, there is no other word for it. They took our Apache 2.0 drivers (and that’s good), then they built a plug-in for PostgreSQL, and it’s based on Aurora PostgreSQL… you don’t get the benefits of MongoDB, you don’t get the benefits from relational, you get something in the middle.
“We think if you want to use the relational, use the relational. If you want to use the document, use the document. We don’t see the need for this product.”
Porter was hired as CTO of MongoDB in July 2020. He was previously the Managing Director of AWS, between May 2013 and October 2018, where he was responsible for Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora and of RDS for PostgreSQL.
AWS launched DocumentDB in January 2019, when Shawn Bice, head of the company’s non-relational database, said AWS decided to “create a new purpose-built document database from scratch. “, with support for MongoDB APIs. This decision was likely related to MongoDB’s introduction of the Server-Side Public License (SSPL), developed because it was “too easy for cloud providers to capture all the value and not give back to the community.”
The SSPL is not approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as an open source license.
We asked AWS about both MongoDB compatibility and the claim that it is PostgreSQL based and we were referred to this FAQ which states that “” MongoDB compatible “means Amazon DocumentDB interacts with open APIs. source Apache 2.0 MongoDB 3.6 and 4.0. “
The current version of MongoDB is 5.0. The FAQ does not mention PostgreSQL.
Has MongoDB asked AWS not to describe DocumentDB as compatible with MongoDB? “We told them it was not compatible with MongoDB … the thing to focus on here is that AWS is a great partner for us, and although part of AWS produces DocumentDB, the great The majority of AWS are close, intimate, and wonderful partners to us. I think you can see that here at the show with our Emerald sponsorship. “
It is true that MongoDB was in the spotlight at Re: invent, with two exhibition stands and an all-week cover of a restaurant on the site.
MongoDB, Porter assured us, is in excellent health. “We have had 200 million downloads of our community software since the company [founded] 16 years ago. We’ve had over 80 million in the past 12 months. We had over 10 million in November, â€he said.
These are non-commercial downloads, not from customers, but Porter expressed the hope that “someday they will start using our commercial products.”
Does MongoDB run on Graviton, AWS ARM based servers? “We’re not racing Graviton yet,†Porter said. “We’re working on it with the AWS team.”
What are the challenges? “When you’re at the application level, your code recompiles and it works. It’s beautiful. When you run a server product or an operating system product, it’s an intimate connection with the chip, the memory, cache, IO subsystem… so we are working to make this integration.
Porter is also passionate about serverlessness, a topic that came up during discussions of Rust’s claims.
Migrating MongoDB code from C ++ to Rust would make little difference for sustainability, he said, but “the other thing I think about for sustainability is serverless. When people allocate their own instances… you have to allocate slack because you might get a burst. We launched the serverless last year and the goal is to operate at a very high utilization rate in order to be more efficient, to pay less to our suppliers, to use less material and to consume less energy. ‘energy.”
Serverless is on AWS, Porter told us, and is currently in beta. Will it really be cheaper for customers than running their own instances?
“Our goal is to make it more economical on a large scale,†Porter said, “but we are currently in beta.†®
