September 2022 Summaries

The MongoDB Podcast has released several notable episodes in 2022 so far, including discussions on WiredTiger storage engine, Postman API testing tool, Prisma ORM for Node.js and TypeScript, and securing the internet through projects like Let's Encrypt. The podcast also features a series of conversations from the MongoDB World Series event, where experts share their stories, learnings, and community insights. These episodes showcase the diversity of topics covered on the podcast, aiming to help communities learn and connect through database and tech discussions.

Introducing Snapshot Distribution in MongoDB Atlas aims to ease the burden of protecting and retaining data for recovery purposes, while meeting compliance regulations with ease. The new feature allows organizations to easily distribute their backup snapshots across multiple geographic regions within their primary cloud provider with the click of a button. This enables automatic distribution of backups directly within the backup policy, eliminating manual processes and freeing up development time to focus on innovation. Snapshot Distribution also optimizes restore speeds by intelligently deciding whether to use the original snapshot or a copied snapshot for optimal restore times.

Satori is a data access service provider that streamlines secure data access, enabling organizations to accelerate their data use by simplifying and automating access policies while ensuring compliance with data security and privacy requirements. Satori's service helps balance the contradictory responsibilities of protecting data from unauthorized access while extracting value from it. By providing a simple, fast, and secure way to manage data access, Satori reduces complexity and operational risk, improving engineering productivity and time-to-value for organizations running MongoDB workloads.

A tech company considering launching a podcast can tap into an existing audience waiting for more content, with 177 million listeners in 2022, and engage with them through a relaxed and natural tone that resonates with 8 out of 10 tech professionals. Podcasts offer flexibility, allowing listeners to consume content on their own schedule, and provide a platform to amplify subject-matter expert voices, connect with industry leaders, and grow a community of engaged listeners who are more likely to follow the organization on social media. By repurposing existing content and leveraging audio-only and video assets, podcasts can also help reach new members of the audience and create additional revenue streams through listener support.

The security mindset has shifted from relying on a perimeter as a protective barrier, as users increasingly access networks and applications from any location, on any device, on platforms hosted in the cloud. The financial services industry deals with confidential client and customer data on a daily basis, making security a high priority due to strict regulations and the perceived value of this data. A zero trust environment presents a new paradigm for cybersecurity, where the perimeter is assumed to have been breached, and every user, device, and connection must be continually verified and audited. This approach requires securing the database, authentication for customers and users, logging and auditing, and encryption in flight, at rest, and in use.

Amazon, the company behind the cloud, underwent a massive migration from relational databases to NoSQL databases as part of its "Rolling Stone" project. The company found that the cost of relational database management systems was spiraling out of control and that most access patterns involved simple inserts, updates, or queries on a single row or table. By choosing to use its own NoSQL database and reworking the engagement model for training, Amazon was able to migrate all Tier 1 RDBMS workloads to NoSQL and reduce infrastructure costs by more than 50% while maintaining high business growth rates. The key to this success was understanding access patterns and modeling data in a way that mirrors those patterns, using techniques such as sharding, indexing, and multikey arrays to eliminate the need for complex joins and reduce time complexity. By adopting NoSQL, Amazon was able to create systems that are fast at high-velocity access patterns, reducing overhead and improving overall performance.

At the Women's Advocacy Summit on July 26, 2022, Sandhya Parameshwara from Accenture emphasized the disconnect between business leaders' perceptions of workplace culture and inclusivity and those of their employees, particularly millennials. Highlighting the importance of "culture makers," who drive inclusivity and innovation, she set the tone for discussions on gender inequality and strategies for fostering equality in the workplace. Anne Chow, former CEO of AT&T Business, stressed the need for moral courage and adaptability in leadership, advocating for a proactive approach to challenges and viewing life as an "optimization equation" rather than seeking balance. Panel discussions, featuring leaders like Microsoft’s Anjali Nair and Samsung's Leigh Nager, explored the evolution of success strategies for women, emphasizing the importance of support networks, mentorship, and authentic representation in male-dominated industries. The event underscored the commercial and societal benefits of inclusivity, advocating for continuous efforts to support women in tech and highlighting opportunities for further engagement through initiatives like the upcoming MongoDB Women’s Group event.

Cloud-native SaaS solutions are vendor-managed applications developed in and for the cloud, offering retailers an alternative to traditional digital transformation approaches that require significant investment. By adopting cloud-native SaaS applications, such as Vue Storefront or Amplience, retailers can accelerate their transformation and time to market without requiring specific in-house technical expertise. MongoDB's product suite is cloud-native by design, making it a great fit for cloud-native SaaS applications, with features like auto-deployment, automatic scaling, globally distributed data, secure from the start, always up to date, monitorable, and reliable. The partnership between MongoDB and Commercetools offers retailers a fully managed ecommerce platform underpinned by MongoDB Atlas, enabling them to transform their ecommerce capabilities in a matter of days, while leveraging composable architecture paradigms.

In the context of open banking, established banks need to transition from sole owners of financial data to partners in a distributed network of services, competing with fintech startups for consumer attention. To achieve this, they must balance data protection with data sharing, complying with evolving global privacy laws and granting consumers explicit consent before sharing their sensitive financial data. Banks are overcoming these limitations by remodeling their approach to data and building a data mesh using a modern developer data platform, which enables decentralization of data sharing and governance, and self-service consumption of that data. This decentralized approach encourages departments within the bank to adopt a "product-like" mentality toward the data within their domain, ensuring it is maintained and made available like any other service or product they deliver. By facilitating responsible, efficient data sharing across their financial institution, banks can open new doors for better customer outcomes and improved bottom lines.

What’s New in Atlas Charts: Streamlined Data Sources` Atlas Charts has streamlined data sources to automatically add MongoDB Atlas data with zero setup required, eliminating the need for manual steps to add clusters and collections. This feature optimizes the data visualization workflow by making clusters, serverless instances, and federated database instances available as data sources within Charts. Project owners maintain control over limiting access to sensitive data while still providing easy access to project members. The new feature aims to make visualizing Atlas data more frictionless and powerful with every release.

MongoDB has introduced several notable improvements with its release of version 6.0, including enhanced query capabilities that allow users to leverage enriched queries, top N accumulators, array sorting, densification and gap-filling, joining sharded collections, change streams pre- and post-images, and Atlas Search across multiple collections. These features can be used in various scenarios such as grouping data by cuisine to find the top-rated restaurants, sorting comments based on likes received, creating time series graphs with gaps filled using linear interpolation or constant values, enriching records with corresponding orders from another collection, tracking flight delays with point-in-time pre- and post-image capabilities, and searching across multiple collections with a single query.

The MongoDB Connector for Apache Kafka version 1.8 has been released with new monitoring and debugging capabilities that improve troubleshooting and performance tuning. The connector now implements Java Management Extensions (JMX) interfaces, which provide a simple standard way to access metrics reporting, making it easier to visualize data using tools like Prometheus or JConsole. Additionally, the release includes extended debugging features with more descriptive error messages, aiming to enhance user experience and facilitate issue resolution.

MongoDB hosts popular MongoDB.local events in major cities around the world, bringing together engineers, entrepreneurs, and executives to learn from experts, network, and explore the latest products. This year, admission is free for all upcoming events, which include sessions on serverless technology, demos of next-generation technology, and workshops on various skill levels and specialities. The events also offer opportunities to expand professional networks, explore product booths featuring MongoDB and third-party partners, and enjoy a unique learning experience in memorable venues.

Vanta, a security and compliance automation platform, has partnered with MongoDB to automate up to 90% of security audits. The company was founded by Christina Cacioppo, who worked on Dropbox's Paper project, and uses MongoDB Atlas as its database of record. Vanta helps companies scale security practices and automate compliance for various regulatory frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and CCPA. The platform has integrated with MongoDB to enable fast and secure data processing, and the company's growth is tied to its ability to integrate with other tools and build new features. Vanta values the flexibility of the document model that underpins MongoDB Atlas, which allows it to iterate rapidly while still feeling safe about changes. The company has benefited from the MongoDB for Startups program, which offers access to resources such as free credits to MongoDB Atlas, personalized technical advice, co-marketing opportunities, and access to the developer community.

MongoDB Atlas is being used to optimize business processes, gain visibility into metrics, and create automation routines in a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The company created an internal solution using MongoDB Atlas to streamline their own business operations, including revenue forecasting and data analysis. They leveraged the flexible schema concept, query language, and aggregation framework of MongoDB to build a scalable and efficient system. The solution uses serverless abstraction layers, connectors for BI, Atlas GraphQL API, and App Services wire protocol to access and manipulate data from other components. It also employs database triggers for propagating changes and generating data-driven events. By following key principles such as focusing on bringing in data in the form that makes sense for the business, applying transformations in the ETL process, and structuring MongoDB documents in a way that makes it clear which fields are owned by what producer, the company was able to build an efficient system that is easy to modify and extend.

The software industry is experiencing a surge in demand for new applications, with over 750 million new applications expected to be built by 2025. This has led to a significant shortage of developers, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics predicting that 400,000 more developers will be needed by the end of this decade. However, many developers are struggling to innovate due to high workloads, complex data architecture, and legacy systems that hinder productivity and efficiency. A recent survey found that only 28% of technology teams' time is spent working on defining and building new features and applications, while 72% is spent on managing infrastructure and administrative tasks. To overcome these challenges, organizations need to provide developers with the proper tools, simplify data architecture, and address legacy systems and technical debt to enable innovation and create quality work.

MongoDB has partnered with Codecademy on a new "Learn MongoDB" course that teaches the basics of MongoDB and how to perform CRUD operations, query and analyze data, and create and use indexes. The free, self-paced course is designed for developers who want to learn how to build applications on top of MongoDB and offers interactive tutorials and quizzes throughout. By completing additional coursework on the programming language of their choice on Codecademy, early-career developers can learn how to code across the full application stack. This partnership aims to help developers harness new solutions to their full potential by providing a comprehensive learning experience through educational courses like "Learn MongoDB".

MongoDB Relational Migrator is a tool that streamlines migrations from legacy data infrastructure to MongoDB by analyzing relational database schemas, converting them into MongoDB schemas, and migrating data. It simplifies the process of transforming data according to new schema, while ensuring organized and logical data in an organized manner. The tool provides two modes of data transfer: a one-time snapshot or continuous sync, and is currently compatible with four common relational databases: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. While it's not a silver bullet for modernizing applications, MongoDB Relational Migrator facilitates schema mapping and provides many abilities for effective schema design. It's available in early access for non-production workloads with assistance from Product and Field Engineering teams.

The benefits of moving away from monolithic applications and adopting a microservices architecture include alignment with how humans work best together, protection from complete downtime, better application scaling, and increased speed to market. Many organizations are already using microservices in their production and development, with research showing that 36% of large companies, 50% of medium companies, and 44% of small companies are already utilizing this approach. A monolithic approach does not support the fast time-to-market cycles needed for businesses to remain competitive, while a microservices architecture provides a working environment for developers to speed up the release process.