MongoDB 30,000 downloads a month?

Image by Cesar Rodas via Flickr

While I have written about NoSQL generating a lot of buzz recently I have also written that when compared with the activity that is occurring day in, day out on relational databases it is very minor.  I would suggest those working with NoSQL databases are still a fraction of a percent of those working with more traditional relational databases.

Which is why I was surprised to read recently over on Intelligent Enterprises blog an interview with 10gen founder Dwight Merriman:

“When his company first started making MongoDB available for free downloads last year, they numbered a few hundred a month. But traffic has rapidly built up to a level of 30,000 downloads a month, he said.”

30,000 downloads a month?  That is about half the monthly downloads that I heard somewhere MySQL is getting (this is likely wrong also btw, I couldn’t validate it after 5 mins on Google).  This astronomical number peaked my interest so I quickly did a little checking on the MongoDB site.  Couldn’t find any download stats but I did notice some stats relating to the number of people who…

Image by Cesar Rodas via Flickr

While I have written about NoSQL generating a lot of buzz recently I have also written that when compared with the activity that is occurring day in, day out on relational databases it is very minor.  I would suggest those working with NoSQL databases are still a fraction of a percent of those working with more traditional relational databases.

Which is why I was surprised to read recently over on Intelligent Enterprises blog an interview with 10gen founder Dwight Merriman:

“When his company first started making MongoDB available for free downloads last year, they numbered a few hundred a month. But traffic has rapidly built up to a level of 30,000 downloads a month, he said.”

30,000 downloads a month?  That is about half the monthly downloads that I heard somewhere MySQL is getting (this is likely wrong also btw, I couldn’t validate it after 5 mins on Google).  This astronomical number peaked my interest so I quickly did a little checking on the MongoDB site.  Couldn’t find any download stats but I did notice some stats relating to the number of people who had signed up to the support forums:

• The  mongodb-user Google group has 1682 members
• The mongodb-announce group, the “This group is for releases and important updates to MongoDB that anyone running MongoDB in production  should subscribe to” has 53 members.
• The MongoDB site blog has 916 subscribers in Google Reader

These numbers don’t seem to correlate to users downloading 30,000 copies of MongoDB a month.  I could be wrong and the figure might be accurate, but perhaps this may have actually been page views on the MongoDB site rather than software downloads?  It if is accurate then I will take my hat off to 10gen, they have come much further than I thought.

I am one of the biggest proponents of “the right tool for the right job”, and I think NoSQL databases can be the right tool in a lot of cases.  But we need to keep our heads about us also.  We still have a very long way to go before any of this NoSQL stuff is considered mildly mainstream.

BTW, I will ping Charles Babbock for comment.