What we learned at MongoDB World 2019
Michael Harrison and I were lucky enough to get to attend MongoDB world in New York City in June. This was my fifth MongoDB world and my fourth in NYC. It’s always a pleasure to visit New York, though it’s a terribly long flight from Melbourne — 15 hours to get to LA, then another 5 hours to NYC. Hitting the ground running the next morning required truly heroic amounts of caffeine!
We were there to man the ProvenDB booth in the partner pavilion. We met with hundreds of MongoDB developers, many of whom were wanted to learn how to implement Blockchain in their MongoDB applications:
The MongoDB World opening keynote is probably the most significant hour in each year for the MongoDB team. It’s where they unveil all the cool new technology and get to highlight MongoDB achievements. As usual, the MongoDB team gets to take pride in their growth. According to the statistics, every developer in the world has now downloaded MongoDB about three times:
MongoDB Atlas continues to show really strong growth and is the center pin of MongoDB's commercial strategy.
MongoDB 4.2
As usual, we heard about some pretty cool new features in the next release of MongoDB — version 4.2. Much of this had already been disclosed, such as:
- Sharded transactions
- General availability of MongoDB Charts and the MongoDB Kubernetes operator
We also found out about some interesting new features in 4.2 that had been kept under wraps:
- Lucene integration allows you more easily add full-text search to your application. For now, it looks like this feature is only available for MongoDB Atlas. It looks pretty easy to set up and a new operator in the Aggregation Framework —
$searchBetacan be used to access the Lucene index. - Update enhancements: such as being able to embed aggregation framework statements into an update, or use existing attribute values in a $set statement will be very welcome.
- At ProvenDB, we have been waiting anxiously for the $merge aggregation operator. It lets us take the output from an aggregation and push it into an existing collection. This all happens at the back end, so we avoid having to pull the data across the network and push it back.
- Wildcard indexing allows you to create an index that covers all of the attributes in a sub-document. Very useful, though I suspect that these indexes will be expensive to maintain and should be used sparingly.
- Client-side encryption allows data to be encrypted at the source so that the database never sees the clear-text data.
- The MongoDB Atlas Data Lake allows you to use MongoDB to search for data in S3 buckets. This is conceptually similar to the External Table feature that we’ve had in Oracle and other SQL databases in the past. You don’t have to actually load the data into MongoDB to query it. This feature is super useful when performing ETL type processing.
In general, these are the sort of useful features that you expect in a point release, but without anything that changes the game for MongoDB. One thing is clear: a lot of these features are showing up in Atlas only or in Atlas first. Obviously, MongoDB believes that Atlas is the future of the database and wants to make it super compelling.
Lots of fun
There were a ton of fun activities around the show. Game machines were scattered everywhere, and the swag was better than ever. Providing you were prepared to scan QR codes all around the show you could end up with socks, jackets, t-shirts and more. For the Australian attendees, a table-tennis championship in the evening was a lot of fun.
BuilderFest
The show finished off with builderFest sessions in the partner pavilions. We ran sessions on ProvenDB, which gave us a chance to do a live demo with people following along on their laptops. It was really wonderful of MongoDB to give us this opportunity to interact with potential users.
Wrapping up
MongoDB runs a great conference and continue to balance education, networking, and fun activities. I’d recommend the show to any and all MongoDB users. But you don’t necessarily need to come all the way to New York City. The company is running MongoDB.local sessions in major capitals around the world and have meetups in pretty much every city. And their online resources — especially the MongoDB University courses — are great. Still, nothing beats coming to the center of it all at MongoDB World.
ProvenDB integrates MongoDB with the Bitcoin Blockchain. Immutable versions of database state are anchored to the Blockchain, delivering an unparalleled level of data integrity. ProvenDB allows MongoDB developers to build high-performance applications that include cryptographic proof of data integrity and provenance without having to understand blockchain programming complexities.
