Max Schireson Appointed President of MongoDB Company, 10gen

This is a quick post to congratulate Max Schireson on his appointment to President of 10gen, the company behind red-hot NoSQL database MongoDB.

Quoting their press release:

“Max brings to 10gen a strong understanding of the database market, both from the perspective of an established market leader and an upstart alternative technology,” said Dwight Merriman, co-founder and CEO of 10gen. “Usage of MongoDB has been growing explosively; adding Max to the team will help us scale the company to keep up with the interest in our technology.”

Like MarkLogic, MongoDB is a highly-scalable, document-oriented, and schema-free database system.  Unlike MarkLogic, MongoDB is open source, JSON-oriented, and in use at many web 2.0 startups like foursquare, Etsy, bit.ly, github, bump, Disqus, EventBrite, and others.  While MarkLogic uses a query language (XQuery) to access the DBMS, MongoDB is what I call a “revenge of the programmers” database that, like object databases back in the day, are preferred by programmers for their interfaces to popular languages.

I had the pleasure of working with Max for 6+ years at MarkLogic, think he’s one of the smartest people I know, and wish him well in this new endeavor.  One way I judge my own success as a manager is to judge the career success of those who worked for me.  I think this is a great move for Max and a great move for 10gen.