Remember that line in the classic 1967 Dustin Hoffman film The Graduate where Mr. McGuire offered Benjamin one word of advice, "Plastics"? If that movie was filmed in 2012, he would have said "MongoDB."
Well, maybe he would have said "HTML5" but if he was offering two words of advice, the next word would have been "MongoDB" for sure.
The point is, he wouldn't have said "iOS" or "Android" or even "mobile."
That's because in a list of the Top 10 most sought after job skills by resume site Indeed.com, MongoDB is No. 2 -- beat only by HTML5. That makes MongoDB more sought after than iOS and Android and mobile. Indeed.com searches millions of job postings to come up with its list of the fastest growing keywords.
With Tuesday's news that 10gen, makers of the MongoDB database, grabbed a boatload of new funding on a half billion valuation, we are looking at a company that will very likely do what no other open source company besides Red Hat has done yet -- become a billion dollar company.
And that's only the beginning because "the database market is bigger than the server/operating system market," says 10gen's CEO Dwight Merriman.
Merriman is also a cofounder, investor, and board member of Business Insider.
We got on the phone with him this week to find out his plans for the company.
In a word: huge.
"The goal is to have the most popular database period, used more than Oracle or [IBM's] DB2," he says. Merriman isn't just the CEO. He co-wrote MongoDB with 10gen co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz.
This doesn't mean 10gen will kill Oracle -- just maim it. Traditional databases will always be around. But MongoDB is a new type of database, known as "noSQL." It is better for Web apps and the cloud -- and that's the next big thing for software.
It's better for the cloud because noSQL can instantly grow really big by spreading itself over lots of ordinary, cheap Intel-based servers. This type of database can also handle data that's messy and unpredictable. A traditional database wants things tightly structured and all on one server. As it grows, it needs a bigger, more expensive server.
Because more companies are writing web apps, they are trying MongoDB or one of its competitors (Couchbase, Cassandra). Once they try noSQL and see how easy it is to use, they always come back from more, says Merriman.
"It's to the point now, where some organizations are using Mongo as the default choice when write a new app," he says.
By the way, Business Insider uses MongoDB and has since 2009. Here's a very technical article that explains how we're using it.
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Disclosure: Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, the founders of 10gen, are investors in Business Insider.
