FerretDB promotes an alternative to MongoDB

MongoDB is hot and appears as a monopoly for Document DB, one of the NoSQL database types available on the market. Founded in 2007, MongoDB, started as 10Gen, developed and promoted an open source approach. With the arrival of Dev Ittycheria as CEO in 2014, the shift to a real business machine was initiated and the company adopted a close model and terminated its open source philosophy. The company did its IPO in 2017 at Nasdaq under the ticket MDB and recent market capitalization reaches $13B. The annual revenue is around $2B for its last financial year. But it turns out that users, who have been attracted by a clear obvious value both from a product perspective and license model, were impacted and some alternatives were triggered.

One of the alternatives is FerretDB, a project started by a group of talented people such as Peter Farkas, CEO, Alexey Palazhchenko, CTO, 2 ex-Percona guys, and Peter Zaitsev, advisor, former CEO of Percona. The firm, based in Delaware, US, has raised $2.8M in 2022 and currently has 8 people. 

We had the chance to meet Peter during the recent IT Press Tour organized in London early April. And I'm particularly glad that Peter joined us as I tried to invite him for several months.

FerretDB has its roots in the original open source model MongoDB used and its shift to close source in 2018 plus issues it created at customers sites with vendor lock-in. Probably not on the technical aspect but rather on the financial dimension. In detail MongoDB uses the SSPL - Server Side Public License - and developed a specific query language, MQL for MongoDB Query Language, that has even more locked users.

So what is FerretDB?

In simple words, FerretDB is a compatible MongoDB database built on PostgreSQL and distributed in open source.

Starting the FerretDB project at the end of 2021, MongoDB tried to stop the initiative with legal pressure but it appeared that it went nowhere so far. The FerretDB team has designed, and written in Go, a layer on top of PostgreSQL database and runs on-premise or in the cloud under the Apache 2.0 license.

The goal is to run an application built with MongoDB MQL to operate the same way without any changes on top of FerretDB.  The architecture they adopted, described below, illustrates the approach perfectly.

Today, more than 4,000 instances are running with FerretDB but there should be much more as these are only the ones with Telemetry enabled. Even with 8 people, the project has more than 200 contributors and received 10k stars on GitHub.

In 2023, FerretDB initiated a collaboration with Microsoft to address the MongoDB challenge.

This story justifies the need for an Open Standard for Document Databases in order to democratize the model.

Clearly, the industry needs projects like FerretDB. Good luck guys.