NoSQL database vendor MongoDB says it is making significant gains against open source relational rival PostgreSQL in a claim that seems to fly in the face of recent research.
Speaking as the company announced its second quarter results – which beat expectations with revenue up 13 percent to $478.1 million – CEO Dev Ittycheria claimed that recent success had partly been down to competitive wins against PostgreSQL, the system that became the most popular database among professional developers last year, according to a Stack Overflow survey.
MongoDB suffered operational losses of $71.4 million in Q2 of its fiscal 2025 ended July 31, much higher than the $49.0 million recorded in the same quarter last year. Yet Ittycheria was not about to let that spoil the upbeat mood following the results, which saw the company's value climb 14 percent.
He said MongoDB had used its database service, Atlas, to win workloads off PostgreSQL in a project at Fanatics Betting & Gaming, a division of sports ecosystem company Fanatics, which is worth around $30 billion.
"Initially, the team launched a platform on PostgreSQL but faced challenges with scalability, flexibility, and excessive complexity," the CEO said on an investor call. "After migrating to MongoDB Atlas, the team also integrated Atlas Search to provide users with a better experience to find all available betting options. Fanatics plans to continue to expand on MongoDB Atlas as they ensure they can operate at scale as they prepare for the start of the NFL season."
The context of Fanatics Betting & Gaming's decision remains obscure. Maybe they just did not pick the right database for the job first time round.
Nonetheless, Ittycheria maintained it was part of an ongoing trend in pitching MongoDB against PostgreSQL. He pointed out that PostgreSQL had been around for 40 years, as if that was a bad thing.
"That technology has been around a long time," he said. "They're really the beneficiary of lift and shift from Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL, so they're kind of consolidating the relational market. In terms of why do we compete or why do we win… MongoDB has a very flexible schema allowing you to store documents in a JSON-like format. This is beneficial for application structures that evolve over time.
"We can horizontally scale," he added, "so we're making it very easy to distribute data across multiple servers or virtual servers for applications that require massive amounts of data. Again, we can handle the performance of large data sets better than PostgreSQL. The built-in sharding allows for automatic data distribution."
He also claimed that MongoDB was better for developer productivity because the JSON-like format and flexible schema leads to faster development cycles, helping customers who employ agile development.
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Ittycheria questioned whether users migrating from legacy relational databases to PostgreSQL "just want to stay on relational because that's what they know."
With their inevitable vested interest, comments like this leave much to unpack. PostgreSQL overtook MongoDB on the DB-Engines ranking some time in 2017 and the gap has been widening ever since. In the latest Stack Overflow survey, PostgreSQL gained ground and is now used by 52 percent of developers.
While some applications may be best supported by a specialist document database, PostgreSQL can support JSON documents and has been able to do so for years.
It's also important to remember that PostgreSQL is not just PostgreSQL. The big three cloud vendors all support PostgreSQL front end services, while CockroachDB and YugaByteDB both provide front ends that are near-compatible with PostgreSQL, with the added benefit that they support distributed back ends for large-scale global applications.
The latest financial news from MongoDB follows a rocky period for the NoSQL database company.
In May, its valuation tanked by as much as a quarter after it lowered expectations for revenue growth during the rest of the year, disappointing investors. It will take more than a few disputable claims against a rival database to regain that lost ground. ®