What does the future hold for NoSQL?

Things like Linux and MySQL were hatched by Europeans, yet their broadest adoption has been in the U.S. On a government level, however, Europe has definitely led over the U.S. Europe has long pointed to the benefits of using open source. Now it just needs European companies to listen more.

TRP: You received considerable funding in 2013 from a range of sources, how is this investment being used?

MA: While it's great that MongoDB has raised over $200 million, it's still quite small compared to the billions that Oracle and other legacy incumbents have at their disposal. The thing we have that our proprietary competitors do not is a vibrant, massive open-source community.

We're spending a great deal of money investing in an even bigger, stronger engineering team, but we're always mindful of the need to multiply our internal resources by the power of our external community.

In addition to engineering, we're expanding our footprint to Asia-Pacific and strengthening our presence further in EMEA. We're very fortunate to have the resources to be able to hire exceptional people everywhere.

Ultimately, it's people, not money, that will make MongoDB the most widely used database on the planet.

TRP: What does the rest of 2014 hold for MongoDB?

More and faster! In 2014 I expect to see a winnowing down of the NoSQL database population. Today, DB-Engines.com lists over 200 databases, many of them NoSQL databases. By the end of the year, the market will have settled on two to three primary NoSQL databases, similar to what happened in the relational database market.

MongoDB is currently the top NoSQL database by a considerable margin, and we want to make it even easier to embrace MongoDB by expanding our partner reach, widening our physical footprint throughout Europe and Asia-Pacific and constantly improving the core database.