{"id":133546,"date":"2023-07-27T06:03:24","date_gmt":"2023-07-27T06:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monday.com\/blog\/?p=133546"},"modified":"2023-08-29T08:52:56","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T08:52:56","slug":"introducing-mondaydb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monday.com\/blog\/product\/introducing-mondaydb\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing mondayDB 1.0 – Infrastructure Built for Performance, Scale, and Flexibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, we announced that we have officially rolled out mondayDB 1.0 to 100% of our customers. To mark the occasion, we thought it was only fitting to take you, reader, through the journey of just how the mondayDB came to be.<\/p>\n

mondayDB is the new data infrastructure behind our monday.com Work Operating System, designed to drive your best work. Built by our monday.com team, the new data architecture uniquely suits the platform\u2019s needs. It was created to adapt to the most extensive, complex work scenarios imaginable, allowing organizations of any size to build and manage workflows at scale while enjoying exceptional performance.<\/p>\n

mondayDB 1.0, the released foundational version, allows loading boards with thousands of items up to 5X faster, enabling customers to work with data-intensive and complex workflows. It also improves the performance, user experience, and responsiveness of the monday.com Work OS platform, ensuring that massive Boards load in seconds and that key Board interactions happen nearly instantaneously.<\/p>\n

1.0 is just the start. Future releases are planned throughout the coming years, providing additional speed improvements, scale, and extended functionality. However, let\u2019s take a step back and start from the beginning.<\/p>\n

The Origin Story<\/b><\/h2>\n

In 2014, when we introduced monday.com to the world (our company was called \u201cdaPulse\u201d), boards were uncomplicated, and many of our customers were SMBs trying to solve everyday problems. For example, managing a few projects, each with a few tasks.<\/p>\n

Tables (now known as Boards) were smaller-scale, and the reporting and aggregation functionality required for handling them, such as sorting and filtering, was effortless. There were way fewer column types, widget types, automations, and formulas. We addressed most use cases by providing a primarily client-based solution for showing and analyzing data and using a monolithic database for long-term storage.<\/p>\n

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Simpler times, with smaller Boards that easily fit in customers\u2019 browsers<\/i><\/p>\n

Catalyst For Change\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

As time passed, our customers grew, and our product needed to grow with them. As the years went by and our customer base diversified, the scale of Boards and Dashboards we hosted for our customers kept growing. The number and size of accounts we onboarded every week and the complexity and variety of data query use cases we handle are still growing. We were blown away by the incredible use cases and work processes our customers were using monday.com for.<\/p>\n

We realized that the current infrastructure wasn\u2019t allowing us to give customers the experience and performance they have come to rely on from the monday.com Work OS platform. These challenges led us to move to a new data infrastructure that had to solve two critical issues. It would have to be an immediate solution to our current problems, and it would have to be flexible enough to meet the required workloads as we keep scaling up.<\/p>\n

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Things are scaling up. More customers, more use cases, bigger and more complex Boards and Dashboards. Gotta go server-side.<\/i><\/p>\n

Bringing it to Life<\/b><\/h2>\n

This idea for a new data infrastructure wasn\u2019t a new one for us. We began toying with the idea a few years before we started building it. We knew this wasn\u2019t something we could just dive right into, so we had to take an approach as strategic as possible.<\/p>\n

We decided to begin with an initial evaluation of some existing off-the-shelf solutions. We would have scaled up by industry standards with MySQL, elasticSearch, or Clickhouse solutions. Those mentioned above are powerful tools for solving specific problems – providing real-time updates, handling a large data throughput, providing increased flexibility, or the ability to scale up indefinitely. However, the complexity of monday.com\u2019s platform coupled with the scale and flexibility we aspire to, we weren\u2019t willing to compromise on any of those requirements. We eventually realized we would have to resolve things internally and build our own solution.<\/p>\n

After another year of exciting research and development, we entered the uncharted territory of technical challenges and creative solutions on a quest to create what is now mondayDB. This resulted in a robust data engine containing all the platform\u2019s data, with the ability to query it quickly – specifically designed for the unique needs of monday.com.<\/p>\n

By early 2023, the data infrastructure was ready to receive its first \u201cinternal client,\u201d – and we started working on connecting our Boards using a newly built Query layer. The fruit of this integration went through successful Alpha and Beta stages, and last May, we began gradually rolling it out to selected customers.<\/p>\n

The Benefits\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

A company-owned data management system has many benefits, the most important being that we can tailor mondayDB to the platform\u2019s unique needs. For example, we can build custom solutions to focus on specific monday.com use cases and optimize them to our needs. This includes links between tables and aggregations on custom UDFs (formulas). We can also run the Resource Control – by separating storage from compute, we can scale horizontally and optimize our server usage according to a customer\u2019s needs. Our ability to monitor and analyze our usage allows us to optimize our resources accordingly.<\/p>\n

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As mentioned, mondayDB will enable more complex workflows, bigger boards and dashboards, and more robust developer capabilities. While developing the new infrastructure, we were powered by the desire to increase the value of monday.com for our customers. mondayDB offers many benefits, but we want to spotlight the most impactful that will allow our customers to benefit holistically.<\/p>\n

mondayDB in the Wild<\/b><\/h2>\n

While mondayDB is new to many of our customers today, we were lucky enough to test the updated infrastructure with select customers beforehand. We\u2019ve already seen how impactful the switch to mondayDB has been for them and can\u2019t wait for the rest of our customers to start experiencing these benefits.<\/p>\n

Here are some incredible examples of the benefits mondayDB is already providing:<\/p>\n