MongoDB World Review

This week I attended MongoDB’s annual user conference, MongoDB World. Many of the attendees were developers focused on mobile, web, and analytics application development. During the first day key note Docker CEO Ben Golub said “The most interesting people are doing the most interesting things with Open Source technology”. For many of the developers I work with today, open source tools like MongoDB are fundamental to their strategy.

Since MongoDB just announced version 3.0 just four months ago and the acquisition of WiredTiger less than a year ago I was interested in the community feedback. I found a good number of users had deployed MongoDB 3.0 or had at least been testing it. Feedback was very positive with many seeing significant performance improvements based on the WiredTiger over MongoDB’s default MMapv1 engine. The management of MongoDB is also much easier with the new OpsManager.

During the breakout sessions and discussion in the solutions expo I met many customers from some very large companies planning to migrate more database workloads to MongoDB. Typically MongoDB has been used successfully for a year or two primarily for new applications.  As legacy mission critical applications are being updated, many developers I talked to are planning to use MongoDB as the database platform for both structured data that previously was stored in Oracle. Many of the new applications would be combining both structured and unstructured data (i.e. documents, video, …) content. Many of these developers were looking for enterprise grade storage and data protection infrastructure solutions in preparation for scaling their MongoDB environments.

During the second day keynote MongoDB founder, and CTO, Eliot Horowitz introduced planned features for the 3.2 release coming later this year. Eliot commented that the WiredTiger acquisition accelerated the product roadmap significantly. The most interesting 3.2 features to me were:

• Data-at-rest-encryption: this function is coming from the WiredTiger acquisition. It will be configured as a separate storage engine, which will provide flexibility. It will be interesting to see the resource requirements on the server and whether it will be more efficient to have the function performed by an external storage array for larger deployments
• Document Validation: MongoDB will validate the documents match the intended schema at the time they are written.
• Dynamic Lookups: sounded like SQL left outer joins but Eliot assured the audience it was much different…
• BI connectors: this will make it easier for analysts to use the most popular analytics tools such as Tableau, Business Objects, and Cognos. Many open source analytics tools are available that interface with MongoDB but require analysts to learn new tools.

MongoDB continues to embrace it’s open source routes and now has over 9 million downloads. Based on all the changes in MongoDB management team and acquisition of WiredTiger over the past year it was impressive to see the passion of the developer community with more workloads being targeted for MongoDB.