More than 1 million people have enrolled in courses that teach how to use MongoDB, the database company that is gaining adherents with developers even as it gains ground in Oracle and Microsoft.
The company told Business Insider on Thursday that MongoDB University, a series of free online courses that teach users how to use the open source database platform, has surpassed one million records.
The growing popularity of MongoDB University has helped the platform, which was founded in 2007, to take off with developers as an alternative to Oracle and Microsoft's oldest and established database programs, which were originally created to deal with types more rigid data.
According to the annual survey of Stack Overflow developers, MongoDB is the fourth most popular database, behind Oracle's MySQL, Microsoft's SQL server and PostgreSQL. The company says that more than 40 million people have downloaded MongoDB so far.
The company sees success as a sign of its traction with developers, and of how MongoDB is becoming a desirable skill for anyone trying to advance their career.
"We have examples of people in small countries trying to level up to improve their career opportunity, we have large companies that use nothing more than MongoDB University to train their team, and this is why we decided to invest to make it as easy as possible. learn to use MongoDB, "Shannon Bradshaw, Vice President of Education, told Business Insider.
Filming during Hurricane Sandy
MongoDB University was created by a small team of five people in 2012, with some complications.
The first set of courses was scheduled to be filmed and loaded in October 2012. When Hurricane Sandy hit, although the power outages of the storm prevented the New York-based company from doing the rest of the videos.
But the team still wanted to find a way to get the rest of the lessons online, since students from all over the world were expecting courses. To upload videos, the then vice president of education of the company used a generator, his cell phone and a camera team to shoot each video and send the footage to the company's video team. The co-founder of MongoDB went to a nearby Starbucks, the only place with power, and filmed videos there.
Since its first year, the number of employees in the MongoDB University team has increased from five to more than 20.
"I think that's indicative of the way the whole company is really behind the idea of MongoDB University and how far the company was willing to go from the start to take off," Bradshaw said.
