April 2022 Summaries

MACH Aligned for Retail: Microservices is an approach to architecting modern applications through open tech ecosystems, specifically microservices, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless. This framework is especially relevant for retail and ecommerce due to its ability to provide agility, flexibility, and performance at scale. The MACH Alliance, of which MongoDB is a member, aims to educate and drive the adoption of this framework to future-proof enterprise technology and propel current and future digital experiences. Microservices are an approach to building applications by breaking down business functions into smaller, self-contained components that function autonomously and are developed and deployed independently. This independence provides quicker time to market, shorter development cycles, and a better customer experience. A microservice-based application optimizes challenges such as dynamic product catalogs, changing customer needs, and scalability. MongoDB is built around fundamental technology principles that ensure companies can reap the advantages of microservices, including a flexible data model, redundancy, automation, and scalability. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas, developers can deploy applications based on microservices with unprecedented agility and flexibility, making it an ideal choice for retail organizations looking to modernize their technology stacks.

MongoDB has opened a new office in Barcelona, Spain, which is part of the company's growing presence in Europe. The office is located in the 22@ innovation district and features a dynamic atmosphere focused on collaboration, inclusion, and trust. The team is made up of over 40 employees from diverse backgrounds, including those who relocated from other countries. The company offers various benefits to its employees, such as above-standard annual leave, fully funded medical plans, employer-funded pension plans, and flexible working policies. The Barcelona office is a hub for the Sales Development, Corporate Sales, Customer Success, and Industry Solutions teams, offering numerous career opportunities in tech sales, customer success, and industry expertise. The city of Barcelona offers a great quality of life, with many international companies investing in the area, making it an exciting time to join MongoDB in Barcelona.

Democratizing Data Access With Plain English, Cogram, and MongoDB` aims to remove the burden of query languages for users early in their journey. This is achieved through the collaboration between MongoDB and startup `Cogram`, which enables language-driven data exploration. Cogram's platform generates a Mongo Query Language (MQL) from natural language questions, allowing users to access and manipulate any data without requiring technical expertise. The partnership also places Cogram within `MongoDB for Startups`, a program designed to support early-stage startups in building and growing data-driven organizations with MongoDB.

Celebrating Earth Day with three MongoDB customers who are making a positive impact on the environment, highlighting their unique approaches and how they utilize MongoDB for sustainability. The University of Bremen's CRC initiative uses MongoDB to handle unstructured data at scale, while Journey Foods leverages it for seamless scalability and ease of use in its machine learning-powered platform. Kode Labs utilizes MongoDB Atlas for a fully managed database to support sustainable buildings and deliver energy-efficient solutions.

Traditional retail banks need to modernize their data estate to build high-quality customer-facing applications and fend off challenger banks. To achieve this, they can follow a 5-phase approach using an operational data layer (ODL) that acts as a bridge between existing systems and new ones. This allows for iterative modernization while preserving legacy components and protecting business-critical operations. An ODL enables banks to switch off legacy infrastructure piece by piece, making database operations more efficient and reducing the need for expensive queries against mainframe data. With an ODL, banks can unify data from multiple systems into a single real-time platform, relieve the mainframe of workloads, and support an evolutionary approach to legacy modernization.

Finding The Right Career Move Thanks to Flexa and MongoDB` Flexa is an employer brand and talent acquisition platform that helps companies get discovered by their ideal candidates, providing transparency in the global job hunting market. The company was initially focused on individual jobs but realized the problem needed to be tackled at a company level, focusing on culture, purpose, and working environment. Flexa has partnered with QVentures for scaling and growth, and MongoDB for Startups program has provided them with support and resources. MongoDB's Atlas platform has enabled Flexa to adapt and scale rapidly, leveraging features such as text search, security, and compliance management.

Every Day Is Tax Day When Your Data Architecture Is Too Complex` The reality of complex data architectures can have a significant impact on an organization, leading to a "tax" on innovation. This phenomenon, known as the data and innovation recurring tax (DIRT), is caused by the need to cobble together niche databases with cumbersome pipelines, or to use off-the-shelf software that doesn't work well together. As a result, developers spend time creating workarounds, rather than working on new features, leading to increased complexity and maintenance costs. Complexity can also lead to decreased innovation, as organizations become bogged down in supporting complex architectures. However, reducing complexity can have the opposite effect, improving the developer experience and hastening time to market, while leaving more opportunities for innovation.

Forward Together: How MongoDB Invests in (and Helps Grow) Modernization Consultancies for Our Customers` MongoDB has launched a modernization investment program focused on specialist system integrators, called Boutique Systems Integrators (BSIs), to help customers and partners address complex technical challenges and industry-specific expertise. The program was created in response to customer feedback that many GSI partners needed assistance with highly tailored solutions. By investing directly in a handful of BSIs, MongoDB has accelerated the growth of these organizations, enabling them to rapidly onboard skilled consultants, launch marketing programs, and drive modernization value for customers. Five investment partners have joined the program: PeerIslands, Exafluence, Gravity 9, Wekan Enterprise Solutions, and Clarity Business Solutions, which can field over 300 modernization consultants familiar with MongoDB. The program aims to support MongoDB adoption, provide a better data experience, and care for customers across various industries and time zones.

Introducing Gap Filling for Time Series Data in MongoDB 5.3 allows developers to handle missing data in time series and regular collections by creating new documents with densified data and filling in null values using linear interpolation or carrying over the last observation. This feature, available in MongoDB 5.3 Rapid Release, streamlines analytics for any use case, enabling valuable insights from continuous time series data. Gap filling combines with densification introduced in MongoDB 5.1 to simplify handling missing data across different collections. With this functionality, developers can build rich analytics on time series data in-flight and deliver operational insight as part of the application experience, overcoming previous trade-offs between specialized systems or complex data pipelines.

QVentures, a venture capital firm, has partnered with MongoDB to support the next generation of B2B SaaS founders by providing direct investment opportunities and fund management from Seed to Series B. QVentures' mission is to work closely with family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals to bring them together with entrepreneurs and founders of businesses between seed and series B levels. The firm's investment thesis focuses on enterprise SaaS, marketplaces, B2B enterprise SaaS, and B2B consumer tech businesses that are highly scalable with next-generation founders. QVentures advises founders to start fundraising early, do their own VC diligence prior to engaging, and not sell their product but rather the business when pitching to investors. The firm also sees value in building partnerships with corporations like MongoDB to fill knowledge gaps in their team and leverage data to evaluate companies effectively.

The MongoDB ASEAN corporate sales team is growing rapidly, with a focus on supporting and empowering its members to achieve their full potential. The team culture is positive and collaborative, with a strong emphasis on continuous learning and professional development. Members of the team report feeling supported and encouraged by leadership, with opportunities for growth and advancement in both technical and business skills. The company's products, including Atlas, are highly regarded and offer a range of exciting features and benefits. With a vibrant and open-minded team environment, MongoDB provides an ideal platform for individuals to learn from each other and develop their skills.

Content discovery is the bidirectional process by which users and applications interact to fulfill users' known and unknown content consumption needs. As content generation increases exponentially, delivering great content discovery experiences will be crucial for keeping up with evolving customer expectations. Content discovery can happen through push (recommendation engines) or pull (search) forces, where the latter is typically a search bar query. Building effective search and recommendation engines is challenging due to integration challenges, data management complexities, and the need for real-time analytics. An advanced data platform like MongoDB Atlas makes content discovery possible by integrating natively with machine learning and artificial intelligence engines, providing real-time recommendations and solving the search bar challenge through its unified data platform and automated search infrastructure management.

The goal of migrating transactional data to MongoDB in AWS with the Zaloni Arena Data Governance Platform is to improve scalability by moving a customer's entire transaction application from an on-premise SQL Server database to MongoDB Atlas, which was facing difficulty scaling its data environment at a rate matching daily ingestion of live data through its servers. The complexity of migrating high volumes of data efficiently from the relational database to AWS and MongoDB presented several challenges, including recognizing potential data complexities due to the customer's global customer base and dealing with large SQL server instances still in use. To overcome these challenges, Zaloni utilized the Arena platform to code, build, and orchestrate the data validation process, establishing a cloud-based data environment that could operate without human interaction and allowed the team to shift their focus on the remaining application migration. The project demonstrated the importance of creating a data validation process, accessing sample data before production starts, and utilizing the Zaloni Arena platform to manage incremental data at hand and provide necessary data transformations using AWS EMR.

Ruby has been added to the Export to Language feature in both Compass and the VS Code Extension for MongoDB, allowing developers to export queries/aggregations to their chosen programming language of choice. The feature was previously limited to four languages: Java, Node.js, C#, and Python, but now supports Ruby, expanding its reach to a broader range of developers. To use the new feature, users can connect to their cluster in VS Code or Compass, build a query/aggregation using the Query API, and export it to Ruby with just a few clicks. The exported code includes sample queries/aggregations and details on driver usage for easy integration into Ruby apps.

Improved Experience for Saved Aggregations and Queries in MongoDB Compass` Tens of thousands of MongoDB users utilize MongoDB Compass to query their data and build sophisticated aggregation pipelines. The new-and-improved experience for saved aggregations and queries aims to address past challenges, including integrating saved queries and aggregations into the standard software-development lifecycle. A new "My Queries" screen allows users to search, sort, and filter across all saved queries/aggregations by database or collection, and apply them across namespaces. This updated feature is expected to make it easier for developers to build, save, and reuse their favorite aggregations and queries, reducing friction in integrating them into the application development process.