This week, we announced that mondayDB 1.0 has been fully rolled out to all of our customers. In celebration of this milestone, we wanted to take you through the journey of how mondayDB came to be.
mondayDB is the new data infrastructure that powers our monday.com Work Operating System, designed to facilitate your best work. Developed by our team at monday.com, this new data architecture caters specifically to the needs of our platform. It is built to handle even the most complex and extensive work scenarios, allowing organizations of any size to build and manage workflows at scale while enjoying exceptional performance.
The release of mondayDB 1.0 marks the foundation of this new infrastructure. With this release, customers can load boards with thousands of items up to 5 times faster, enabling them to work with data-intensive and complex workflows. It also enhances the performance, user experience, and responsiveness of the monday.com Work OS platform. With mondayDB, even large boards load in seconds, and important interactions on boards occur almost instantaneously.
However, 1.0 is just the beginning. We have future releases planned in the upcoming years, which will bring further speed improvements, scalability, and enhanced functionality. But let’s go back to the beginning and explore how it all started.
The Origin Story
Back in 2014, when we launched monday.com (then known as “daPulse”), boards were simple, and many of our customers were small and medium-sized businesses solving everyday problems. For instance, managing a few projects with a few tasks.
Our boards, or tables as they were called at the time, were smaller in scale, and the reporting and aggregation functionalities required for handling them were relatively straightforward. We had fewer column types, widget types, automations, and formulas. We provided a client-based solution for displaying and analyzing data, and used a monolithic database for long-term storage.
Catalyst For Change
Over time, our customer base grew, and our product needed to grow as well. As our customer base diversified, the scale of boards and dashboards hosted on our platform increased. We saw a steady stream of new accounts and witnessed the complexity and variety of data query use cases expanding. We were amazed by the incredible use cases and work processes our customers were using monday.com for.
We realized that our current infrastructure couldn’t provide the performance and experience that our customers had come to expect from the monday.com Work OS platform. These challenges led us to seek a new data infrastructure that could solve two critical issues. First, it needed to be an immediate solution to our current problems. Second, it had to be flexible enough to handle the increasing workloads as we continue to scale.
Bringing it to Life
The idea of a new data infrastructure had been in our minds for a few years before we began building it. We knew we couldn’t simply dive right in; we needed a strategic approach.
We started with an initial evaluation of existing off-the-shelf solutions. We considered scaling up with industry-standard tools like MySQL, elasticSearch, or Clickhouse. While these tools are powerful and capable of solving specific problems, such as real-time updates and handling large data throughput, they couldn’t meet all of our requirements due to the complexity of the monday.com platform and our aspirations for scale and flexibility. Eventually, we concluded that building our own solution internally was the way to go.
After a year of exciting research and development, we embarked on the challenging journey of creating what is now mondayDB. We built a robust data engine that houses all the platform’s data and allows for quick querying, specifically designed for the unique needs of monday.com.
In early 2023, the data infrastructure was ready to be put to the test with our first “internal client.” We began connecting our boards using a newly built Query layer. This integration went through successful Alpha and Beta stages, and in May of this year, we initiated a gradual rollout to selected customers.
The Benefits
Having our own data management system comes with numerous benefits, the most important being the ability to tailor mondayDB to the specific needs of our platform. We can create custom solutions to cater to individual monday.com use cases and optimize them accordingly. This includes establishing links between tables and performing aggregations on custom UDFs (formulas). Additionally, we can run Resource Control, allowing us to separate storage from compute and scale horizontally, optimizing our server usage based on a customer’s requirements. Our monitoring and analysis capabilities enable us to optimize our resources effectively.
As previously mentioned, mondayDB enables more complex workflows, larger boards and dashboards, and more robust developer capabilities. Throughout the development of this new infrastructure, our main driving force was to increase the value of monday.com for our customers. mondayDB offers numerous benefits, but we want to highlight the most impactful ones that provide holistic advantages for our customers.
mondayDB in the Wild
While mondayDB is new to many of our customers, we had the opportunity to test the updated infrastructure with select customers beforehand. We have already witnessed the significant impact that mondayDB has had on their work, and we are excited for all our customers to experience these benefits.
Here are some remarkable examples of how mondayDB is already making a difference:
– A large semiconductor chip manufacturer relies on monday.com as their primary work OS. They use it to manage their engineering tasks, track timelines, and handle customer requests and issues. With boards containing up to 20K items, loading them used to take a significant amount of time, impacting their efficiency. However, they now report that these same boards load in just 5 seconds, a significant boost in performance.
– An American multinational fast food restaurant chain uses monday.com to manage their many restaurants, which involves handling large volumes of employees, customers, providers, invoices, and receipts. Importing data in bulk from external sources, such as Excel spreadsheets, used to take minutes or even hours, and sometimes failed altogether. With mondayDB, they can now successfully import massive item lists and perform their automated workflows, with boards loading in under 4 seconds.
– A digital marketing agency utilizes monday.com as their CRM platform. They manage tens of thousands of leads, contacts, deals, and customers each month. Viewing boards with 20K leads used to result in poor user experience due to long loading times. However, with mondayDB, these boards now load up to 5 times faster, significantly improving the user experience.
We are thrilled to introduce mondayDB to our customers and see how they utilize it to tackle their most significant and complex work scenarios. It empowers them to build and manage workflows at scale without being limited by performance constraints.
But this is just the beginning. We are already working on the second phase of mondayDB, which will bring even faster dashboard loading times – up to 10 times faster. By early 2024, mondayDB will provide increased scalability for the entire Work OS platform, including automations, integrations, and apps, while also extending the monday.com open API.
