An Agile NoSQL Database for Startups

RavenDB Equips Zero to MVP with Extreme Agility.

Unless a client agrees to use RavenDB, I won’t take the client. We are more efficient that way.

Georgios Diamantopoulos, founder of Zero to MVP, Inc.

What do a foodie site for vegans in Abu Dhabi, a social network for employees to communicate with management, and a toll system for a maritime wildlife preserve all have in common?

They are all rapidly growing applications developed by Zero to MVP.

Zero to MVP specializes in enabling new companies to release stellar applications by serving as their development team. They sit with the founders to learn about their vision and turn it into a digital engagement center for their users.

Serving the startup community is exciting. At every step, there are always surprises.

The surprises can either be the springboard or the pitfall. It all depends on the most vital factor in an emerging startup’s success: Agility.

Why an Agile Database is So Important

We don’t want to build something that will be thrown away in six months.

Georgios Diamantopoulos, founder of Zero to MVP, Inc.

A startup entrepreneur flies half-blind. He hasn’t found his niche yet.

When he does find his next path to success, it often contrasts with what his business is doing at the current moment. Entrepreneurs are constantly discovering new ways to better present and promote their products, especially at the infancy of their business.

From an operations standpoint, these pivots are turbulent. From a technical perspective, they can be chaotic.

This becomes the ultimate fork in the road for their current application. Either the application can adapt to the new business environment, making fundamental changes with the company, or it can’t.

Where to Find Extreme Agility

If the app cannot move forward, a startup can instantly lose six months of development by discarding it. That can be very painful for a young organization with limited resources.

To enable extreme agility, Zero to MVP had several options.

The first is a relational SQL database. This option led to a lot of dead-end applications. Relational databases require a schema. As your application expands, so does the complexity of changing it. For a pivot, the cost of these changes becomes prohibitively larger than starting over.

This leads to a lot of wasted resources.

The next choice is to go schemaless. That meant using document databases, which offer greater flexibility. The challenge is to find the right one.

MongoDB might be well known, but they make you play Russian roulette with your queries.

You can have queries without indexes. A user can request information from the application where instead of the database having all sorts of shortcuts inside the massive labyrinth called your data, it has to traverse your entire information system to retrieve a set of results.

That can kill performance. On the cloud, that also increases your costs.

RavenDB is a schemaless Document Database that supports automatic indexing. For startups and businesses that are scaling out, this is critical.

A user cannot perform a query on RavenDB without an index. If an index hasn’t been made yet, RavenDB will set one up automatically. If the current index available is outdated, RavenDB will update and optimize it – and that’s an agile database.

When emerging organizations pivot, one of their chief costs is to create new indexes to support newly recoded applications with queries the database hasn’t seen before. It costs time and lots of developer hours to analyze your systems, make sense of what part of the data goes with the pivot and what doesn’t, and formulate a new index.

RavenDB does it for you. It does it automatically. You can continue discovering new ways to keep growing your business while RavenDB makes the twisting and turning part painless and smooth.

If your business is growing fast, and you need a database that can grow with you, take a demo of RavenDB with a live developer who will be happy to answer all your questions.

Start making that game-winning pivot today!