Fast Go-to-market and Happy Customers: Story of Mooncamp’s Success with Dgraph

Challenges: Finding a Database That Enables Faster Product Iterations

On its journey to create a flexible, agile, and innovative organizational management, Mooncamp faced a number of challenges. Most of the challenges, however, revolved around one element - the database. After evaluating its options, Mooncamp found Dgraph to be the only database that could fuel Mooncamp’s software solution.

Following are some of the challenges Mooncamp was able to take head-on with Dgraph:

Limitless Scaling

Scalability is at the core of Mooncamp’s and its customer’s growth strategy.

Dgraph offers Mooncamp a high level of confidence and assurance when developing new features and talking with customers as it scales to multiple machines or data centers easily. It also has sharded storage and query processing that minimizes the number of network calls. These capabilities power and enable Mooncamp’s growth.

With Dgraph, Mooncamp is confident that the backbone of its system supports limitless scaling.

Graph Database and Development Speed

Development speed was vital to Mooncamp as they wanted to maximize system impact and effectiveness and also have the ability to respond quickly to customers. To achieve this, Mooncamp needed the capability to introduce their own code, which a graph database and Dgraph’s support made possible.

Compliance

Being an HR company, it was imperative for Mooncamp’s database to have certain features, including data security and compliance.

Dgraph checked both of these requirements as today it helps keep Mooncamp’s data secure and GDPR compliant. As Tillmanns explains,

Key Accomplishments: What Mooncamp Has Achieved with Dgraph

Dgraph’s speed, performance, and reliability have helped Mooncamp achieve success in building quickly, scaling effortlessly, and delivering incomparable customer experience. Mooncamp is free to invest their time in developing enhanced product features instead of managing their backend database.

Mooncamp stands on the shoulders of Dgraph, reaching new levels of organizational management system innovation and performance.

Quick Customizability

Initially, Mooncamp considered using a relational database for the core of its SaaS product.

Mooncamp tested MYSQL and determined that a relational database not only would require extensive, time-consuming customizations but also introduces n+1 problems and would result in a complex codebase that’s full of boilerplate code.

With Dgraph, Mooncamp was able to completely tackle the n+1 problem and the myriad of performance issues that result from it. They were able to avoid hindering high-level development and at the same time, increased functionality and flexibility to add and implement code without any additional effort.

Significantly Faster Time-to-market

Mooncamp customers have been surprised and delighted. In one instance, Mooncamp was able to help a customer with a Microsoft Teams integration, which was implemented in just three days (versus a quite lengthy roadmap offered by a competitor). Customers are amazed at the speed at which Mooncamp can innovate and deliver solutions.

Since Mooncamp develops solutions very closely with their clients, the ability to integrate customer feedback, requests, changes, and new features quickly and efficiently was extremely important.

Companies choose Mooncamp because they are confident in Mooncamp’s ability to deliver features without compromising on quality or performance and Dgraph has been a crucial part in building this confidence.

When giving product demos, Mooncamp leverages Dgraph’s capabilities by showing speed and performance results that Mooncamp achieves over a 30-day period. This allows prospective customers to witness Mooncamp's system capabilities firsthand.

Minimized Technical Debt

Dgraph provided Mooncamp with capabilities lacking in traditional relational databases. With Dgraph, Mooncamp saved development time and money by not needing to implement features. Tillmanns says,

Ease of Usage

The daily users of Dgraph at Mooncamp are its developers and for them, the transition from MySQL could not have been easier. engineers. The support, resources, and tools from Dgraph have made their experience extremely positive. From the interactive tour to learning how to work with query language GraphQL+-, functions, and features, Dgraph was easy to learn and deploy. They found it was faster to learn than SQL and more natural and intuitive, especially because Dgraph's query language is GraphQL+-, which is built around GraphQL.

Constant Support

Constant Innovation

Dgraph also changed the way Mooncamp works. Prior to Dgraph, Mooncamp split 50/50 between their backend and frontend development. Now, with a strong and highly scalable backend, Mooncamp is able to devote 90% of its limited time and resources on the frontend - developing each feature around actual business logic and usability without being limited by the technical side of things. As a result, Mooncamp believes that, without Dgraph, its culture and operation would be different, and it wouldn’t create and innovate as it does now.

The agile approach frees Mooncamp from backend complexity, and focuses more on the customer experience within the framework of feature, flow, and business logic. This benefit is a necessity as a startup with limited resources. It also results in Mooncamp having time to focus on what matters most — growth and customers.