Mongo challenges
The important stories? The seven-year old MongoDB named its third CEO, and HBase-focused startup Splice Machine received $3M in new funding. There’s nothing in either of these developments, on their own, or even in combination, that proves HBase is gaining ground on MongoDB. After all, outgoing MongoDB CEO Max Schireson attributes his stepping down to the personal toll of travel between the company’s dual headquarters in Palo Alto and New York, and other demands of the job.
But the occurrence of these two news items in the same week, at the very least, provides food for thought around the NoSQL scene.
MongoDB’s fast growth has seemingly introduced growing pains, not only managerially, but also perhaps technologically. I’m hearing more often from developer and industry friends – anecdotally, to be sure – that Mongo has been letting them down in situations of large scale, be it in cluster size or data ingestion volumes.
False dichotomy?
When the other shoe drops in those conversations, it’s DataStax and Cassandra that are usually presented as the counterpoint. This tends to leave HBase out of the conversation.
But HBase’s momentum is growing, and that has little to do with any growth issues over at MongoDB. While HBase may not have a corporate champion behind it the way Mongo and Cassandra do, it has a lot going for it:
Enough to go around
The interesting thing about HBase, made especially clear by the Microsoft and Splice Machine developments, is that it’s a NoSQL database that augments other data technologies well. HBase’s success isn’t about zero-sum competition and displacement, and it’s not about any one company’s industry prowess.
HBase’s success looks to be about utility and standards. It’s also about HBase’s versatility to work as a standalone database that is nonetheless compatible with other Hadoop technologies and the growing interest in the “data lake” architecture. Keep an eye out for HBase’s continued momentum.
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