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Monday.com launched more than a decade ago looking to assist companionship build a extremely flexible set of business organisation tools like CRM , merchandising , operations and HR , built in custom-make ways you simply could n’t find out of the box . It learned that companies not only like that tractableness , but they also agitate the boundary so far that it was go to outpace the ability of the underlying database technology to continue to manage all of the use cases .
So the companionship begin looking for a switch . With myriad database alternative available off - the - ledge , you would opine see a worthy one would only be a matter of time and testing , but after reexamine several options , and talking to some experts , Monday conclude it needed something more than what was usable in the market .
One of the main yield was flexibleness ; Monday.com had no theme how its customer would fashion the edifice block into diligence . That meant it needed a schemaless database to handle whatever customers decided to build . That ’s when it decided to build its own , but with a turn of events : It would n’t build a unmarried database to take over all the future capabilities . Instead , it would layer on some other databases to handle finical task . It calledthe new solution MondayDB .
The new database has been in stead since July , but as the company makes the transition to the new database , the old one still exists as another level in the complexity that is Monday.com architecture .
Startups have to agnise that no matter how thrifty they may be withtechnology choices — andoften it ’s impossible , as they contend to get a Cartesian product to market — there is no style to predict how products will grow and make grow over metre . That said , at some stop , caller will have to give offtheir proficient debtby start with some entirely new architecture , just as Monday.com has had to do .
We sat down with main product and technology officer Daniel Lereya to get word how the team decided to construct this solution and the challenges it face in find a database technology to meet these unique requirements .
Just another manic Monday
The operation that led to building a database has been on-going for a couple of age . In fact , in January 2021 , the company began exploring ideas for a new database with a completely open psyche . Lereya says the intellect client value Monday.com is the tractability it brings , and the caller needed a root that could handle an adaptable approach .
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The basic building block of Monday is called the “ board , ” which is a table design to prevail a variety of selective information types . The company described it ina blog postannouncing the unexampled database :
We offer over 40 types of tower , and our users enjoy the exemption to filter , sort , or aggregate just about any column combination , each with its own logic for such operations . For instance , if you percolate by somebody , you’re able to do so by their electronic mail , name , or even the squad they ’re a part of .
“ When we built Monday.com , we put a great deal of accent on hold people the building stop to [ essentially ] build their own software themselves , ” Lereya told TechCrunch+ . These construction blocks are board that users can build in a dizzying raiment of way of life .
When the company begin think about this at the start of 2021 , it started with the estimation that it wanted to enable companies to scale to basically whatever they wanted to do , which would necessitate a unexampled database approach .
“ We felt that we did n’t want to do just incremental advance , but we thought that strategically , know also that we were move to keep and go up food market in the futurity , we take a much more robust solution that will sustain all these specific and unique need , ” Lereya said .
Monday morning, you sure look fine
The original thinking was that with so many databases on the securities industry , for sure there would be one that would meet its requirements , and in June 2021 , the company organize a squad to start exploring the available choice .
The group did a comprehensive hunt that include the likes of Elasticsearch , Apache Pinot , ClickHouse , Apache Druid and a broad range of NoSQL databases like CockroachDB , Couchbase , and others , agree to the troupe .
“ We assembled a papers with all the prerequisite for this database . . . and we actually came to the realization that there is no one specific database that answer our needs . And with that , we make up one’s mind to go for the MondayDB project , ” he enounce .
Even after babble to a number of company and expert in the blank space and building some elaborate PoCs , in the end , Monday.com found that none of them really met a tilt of necessary .
In August 2021 , it began progress the unexampled resolution with a small squad of just five engineers . It would take more than a yr to get to beta . That was partly because of the complexity , partly because it was a minuscule squad and partly because the squad need to build for the farseeing haulage and take time to get it right .
As time go on , the team grew , but each of the core Monday component part like board , dashboards and others ask to change to work with the new database . So ultimately the task touched just about every part of the engineering organization .
Interestingly , what Monday.com came up with was not a arrant build - versus - buy decision . “ We did n’t make the database engineering science by itself . We leveraged existing database , so it was a combination of engineering science together with our own layers that became the MondayDB result , ” Lereya said .
The final idea includes this exclusively fresh database on top of the erstwhile database along with Cassandra , Redis and MySQL . That ’s a lot of database engineering science , but it needed every scrap of it to make the full package work for each customer consumption case .
Come Monday, it’ll be alright
The caller begin testing the newfangled database internally in September 2022 with the plan to run both the old database and the new MondayDB simultaneously and roleplay as a kind of check against each other . That direction Monday.com could verify that MondayDB was deport as expected against all of the components and all of the ways that customers use the product .
“ First of all , we got to a phase where we wanted MondayDB in terms of the data to run side by side with our current computer architecture . We thought about it like a phantasma way where we do everything on both the honest-to-god computer architecture and the Modern computer architecture , ” Lereya said .
When Monday.com gave it to initial customer to test , the company made sure that the newfangled database would n’t break anything because it had the ability to twine back if needed . Over time , Monday.com merged in more and more customers before make the prescribed dismissal in July 2023 .
But the old database did n’t get replaced . “ It ’s run concurrently . And really if you recollect , the original database is MySQL , and there are causa in which it ’s better to query that database , ” Lereya said . “ So actually it ’s part of the solution and MondayDB is an additive stratum and not a replacement . ”
With the newfangled database , the society was able to increase capacity 10x , which understand into 500 display panel per dashboard , 1 million item per board and 5 million item per fascia . What ’s more , they built this with five ennead of information integrity ( meaning it is right 99.999 % of the clock time ) with 5x the speed from the previous database and the ability to ramp up in automation that move data to the right place mechanically .
And the dismissal of MondayDB 1.0 is n’t an ending , it ’s a offset . The companionship is looking to cover layer on functionality and make the database as responsive as potential to whatever use shell customers throw at it .
