MongoDB's Eliot Horowitz: The Database Renaissance Has Begun

"Relational databases still work very well for the things they were designed to do. What is happening is that they work so well for those purposes people continue to use them for everything. Relational databases are 40 years old. People are trying to do things with them that were never thought of for the original purpose. From a use case, there are just better choices available today."

NoSQL technologies are giving the database landscape a new look as they steadily push a shift from the relational database model. Young entrants to the alternative technology, such as MongoDB, have been gaining traction despite an admitted need to mature with more needed features.

"For MongoDB as a part of the NoSQL space, it is a matter of maturity. The model is very new -- maybe five or six years from day one of source code. In the database space, that is sort of infantile. Oracle has been around for some 35 years. It is mature. MongoDB has a long way to go to add a lot of the features people need. So there is a lot of work to do to get to where we need to be," Eliot Horowitz, CTO and cofounder of MongoDB (formerly 10gen), told LinuxInsider.

Until a name change in late August, 10gen was the company behind MongoDB, but having a company name different from the database it created caused product confusion. So 10gen refocused its branding to better cash in on MongoDB's ranking as No. 6 by DB-engines, which ranks databases according to Internet chatter, job listings, LinkedIn mentions and Google Trends results.