A Guide to Freeing Yourself from Legacy RDBMS

Dana Groce and Craig Guarente
September 2, 2021 | Updated: January 4, 2023
#Partners#Modernization

Oracle introduced the first commercial relational database (RDBMS) to the market in 1979 — more than a decade before the World Wide Web. Now, digital transformation is reshaping every industry at an accelerating pace. In an increasingly digital economy, this means a company's competitive advantage is defined by how well they build software around their most critical asset — data.

MongoDB and Palisade Compliance have helped some of the largest and most complex Oracle customers transform their architecture and shift to a cloud-first world. Although every client is unique, we have identified three important steps to moving away from Oracle software, reducing costs, and achieving their digital transformation goals:

  1. Understand your business and technical requirements for today and tomorrow, and identify the technical solution and company that will be by your side to help future-proof your organization.
  2. Decipher your Oracle contracts and compliance positions to maximize cost reduction initiatives and minimize any risks from Oracle audits and non-compliance that may derail your ultimate goals.
  3. Mobilize internal momentum and traction to make the move.

MongoDB can help with #1, Palisade Compliance assists with #2, and you have to supply #3.

This is a guide to getting started, as outlined by the main pillars of success above.

1. Understand your requirements and find the right partner — MongoDB

The most common requirements we hear from organizations are that they need to move faster, increase developer productivity, and improve application performance and scale -- all while reducing cost and breaking free from vendor lock-in.

For example, to keep pace with demands from the business, Travelers Insurance modernized its development processes with a microservices architecture supported by agile and DevOps methodologies. But the rigidity of its existing Oracle and SQL Server databases created blockers to move at the speed they needed. The solution was MongoDB and its flexible data model. They eliminated the three-day wait to make any database changes, creating a software development pipeline supporting continuous delivery of new business functionality.

Similarly, Telefonica migrated its customer personalization service from Oracle to MongoDB. Using Oracle, it took 7 developers, multiple iterations and 14 months to build a system that just didn't perform. Using MongoDB, a team of 3 developers built its new personalization service in 3 months, which now powers both legacy and new products across the globe. MongoDB helps Telefonica be more agile, save money and drive new revenue streams.

While some organizations try to innovate by allowing siloed, modern databases to coexist with their legacy relational systems, many organizations are moving to fully replace RDBMS. Otherwise, a level of complexity remains that creates significant additional work for developers because separate databases are required for search, additional technologies are needed for local data storage on mobile devices, and data often needs to be moved to dedicated analytics systems. As a result, development teams move slowly, create fewer new features, and cost the organization more capital.

MongoDB provides the industry’s first data platform that allows you to accelerate and simplify how you build with data for any application. Developers love working with MongoDB’s document model because it aligns with how they think and code.

The summarized functional requirements that we typically hear from leading companies and development teams regarding what they require from a data platform include:

  • A data structure that is both natural and flexible for developers to work with
  • Auto-scaling and multi-node replication
  • Distributed multi-document transactions that are fully ACID compliant
  • Fully integrated full-text search that eliminates the need for separate search engines
  • Flexible local datastore with seamless edge to cloud sync
  • In-place, real-time analytics with workload isolation and native data visualization
  • Ability to run federated queries across your operational/transactional databases and cloud object storage
  • Turnkey global data distribution for data sovereignty and fast access to Data Lake
  • Industry-leading data privacy controls with client-side, field level encryption
  • Freedom to run anywhere, including the major clouds across many regions

MongoDB delivers everything you need from a modern data platform. But it’s not just about being the right data platform; we’re also the right modernization partner. Through our Modernization Program we have built and perfected modernization guides that help you select and prioritize applications, review best practices, and design best-in-class, production-grade, migration frameworks. We’ve built an ecosystem around accelerating and simplifying your journey that includes:

  1. deployment on the leading cloud providers to enable the latest innovations
  2. technology companies that help with data modeling, migration, and machine learning, and
  3. expert System Integrators to provide you with tools, processes and support to accelerate your projects.

We are proud to be empowering development teams to create faster and develop new features and capabilities, all with a lower total cost of ownership.

2. Manage Oracle as you move away — Palisade Compliance

Oracle’s restrictive contracts, unclear licensing rules, and the threat of an audit can severely impact a company’s ability to transform and adopt new technologies that are required in a cloud-first world. To move away from Oracle and adopt new solutions, companies must be sure they can actually reduce their costs while staying in compliance and avoiding the risks associated with an audit. There will be a time when you are running your new solution and your legacy Oracle software at the same time. This is a critical phase in your digital transformation as you do not want to be tripped up by Oracle’s tactics and forced to stay with them.

It may seem counterintuitive, but as you spend less with Oracle you must be even more careful with your licensing. As long as you keep spending money with Oracle and renewing those expensive contracts, the threat of an audit and non-compliance will remain low. Oracle is unlikely to audit a company that keeps giving it money. However, the moment you begin to move to newer technologies, your risk of an audit significantly increases. As a result, you must be especially vigilant to prevent Oracle from punishing you as you move away from them.

Even if you’ve found a technical partner and managed your Oracle licenses and compliance to ensure no surprises, you still have to find a way to reduce your costs. It’s not as simple as terminating Oracle licenses and seeing your support costs go down. As stated above, Oracle contracts are designed to lock in customers and make it nearly impossible to actually reduce costs. Palisade Compliance has identified eleven ways to manage your Oracle licenses and reduce your Oracle support. It is critical that you understand and identify the options that work for your firm, and then build and execute on a plan that ensures your success.

3. Mobilize internal momentum and traction to make the move

Legacy technology companies excel at seeding doubt into organization and preventing moves that threaten their antiquated solutions. Unfortunately, too many companies succumb to these tactics and are paralyzed into a competitive disadvantage in the market.

In software, as in life, it’s easier to stay the course than to follow through with change. But when it comes to technical and business decisions that impact the overall success and direction of an organization, innovation and change aren’t just helpful, they’re necessary to survive--especially in a world with high customer demands and easy market entry.

Ensuring you have the right technical partner and Oracle advisor is the best way to build the confidence and momentum needed to make your move. Creating that momentum is easier with MongoDB’s Database Platform, consisting of a fully managed service across 80+ regions, and Palisade’s expertise in Oracle licensing and contracts.

Technical Alternative (MongoDB) + Independent Oracle Advisors (Palisade) ⇒ Momentum

Parting thoughts

To schedule a preliminary health check review and begin building the right strategy for your needs, fill out your information here. And to learn more about MongoDB’s Modernization Program, visit this page.

About Palisade Compliance

With over 400 clients in 30 countries around the world, Palisade is the leading provider of Oracle-independent licensing, contracting, and cost reduction services. Visit the website to learn more. To schedule a complementary one-hour Oracle consultation send an email to info@palisadecompliance.com.

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Highlight What Matters with the MongoDB Charts SDK

We're proud to announce that with the latest release of the MongoDB Charts SDK you can now apply highlights to your charts. These allow you to emphasize and deemphasize your charts with our MongoDB query operators . Build a richer interactive experience for your customers by highlighting with the MongoDB Charts embedding SDK . By default, MongoDB Charts allows for emphasizing parts of your charts by series when you click within a legend. With the new highlight capability in the Charts Embedding SDK, we put you in control of when this highlighting should occur, and what it applies to. Why would you want to apply highlights? Highlighting opens up the opportunity for new experiences for your users. The two main reasons why you may want to highlight are: To show user interactions: We use this in the click handler sandbox to make it obvious what the user has clicked on. You could also use this to show documents affected by a query for a control panel. Attract the user’s attention: If there's a part of the chart you want your users to focus on, such as the profit for the current quarter or the table rows of unfilled orders. Getting started With the release of the Embedding SDK , we've added the setHighlight method to the chart object, which uses MQL queries to decide what gets highlighted. This lets you attract attention to marks in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or rows in a table. Most of our chart types are already supported, and more will be supported as time goes on. If you want to dive into the deep end, we've added a new highlighting example and updated the click event examples to use the new highlighting API: Highlighting sandbox Click events sandbox Click events with filtering sandbox The anatomy of a click In MongoDB Charts, each click produces a wealth of information that you can then use in your applications , as seen below: In particular, we generate an MQL expression that you can use called selectionFilter , which represents the mark selected. Note that this filter uses the field names in your documents, not the channel names. Before, you could use this to filter your charts with setFilter , but now you can use the same filter to apply emphasis to your charts. All this requires is calling setHighlight on your chart with the selectionFilter query that you get from the click event, as seen in this sandbox . Applying more complex highlights Since we accept a subset of the MQL language for highlighting, it's possible to specify highlights which target multiple marks, as well as multiple conditions. We can use expressions like $lt and $gte to define ranges which we want to highlight. And since we support the logical operators as well, you can even use $and / $or . All the Comparison , Logical and Element query operators are supported, so give it a spin! Conclusion This ability to highlight data will make your charts more interactive and help you better emphasize the most important information in your charts. Check out the embedding SDK to start highlighting today! New to Charts? You can start now for free by signing up for MongoDB Atlas , deploying a free tier cluster and activating Charts. Have an idea on how we can make MongoDB Charts better? Feel free to leave an idea at the MongoDB Feedback Engine .

September 2, 2021
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MongoDB: Powering Digital Natives

Today's rapidly evolving digital landscape is dominated by digital native companies, driving innovation . These are companies born in the digital age and who operate through digital channels with a business model enabled by technology and data. They are not only adept at using technology but are also reshaping the way software is developed and deployed. This article delves into the challenges and opportunities facing digital natives in modern application development, with a particular focus on the complexities of managing data. We’ll explore how the right data platform can empower your digital native organization to build high-quality software faster, adapt to changing market demands, and unlock the full potential of your business. Strong foundations: The four pillars of tech-fueled growth for digital natives Achieving explosive growth requires a strong foundation built on specific principles, which empower rapid scaling and success. Here, we explore the four key pillars that fuel tech-driven growth for digital natives: Product-market fit, fast: As a digital native, you must continuously ship and iterate products to achieve a quick product-market fit. This builds customer trust and captures opportunities before competitors can in an evolving market. Data and AI-driven decisions: You must leverage data to personalize experiences, automate processes, and guide product decisions. A robust data architecture feeds real-time data into AI models, enabling data-driven decisions organization-wide. Balance of freedom and control: Your developers must have the freedom to choose technologies, even as your organization maintains control over the infrastructure to manage risks and costs at scale. Selected technologies must integrate within your overall technology estate. Extensible and open technologies: You must explore disruptive technologies while maintaining existing systems. Freedom from platform and vendor lock-in enables quick adoption of innovations, from current generative AI capabilities to future technological advances. Data: The unsolved challenge in modern application development From cloud platforms and managed services to gen AI code assistants, advancements have transformed how engineering teams build, ship, and run applications: Agile methods and programmatic APIs streamline development, while CI/CD and infrastructure as code automate processes. Containerization, microservices, and serverless architectures enable modularity, while new languages and frameworks boost capabilities. Enhanced logging and monitoring tools provide deep application health insights. Figure 1: Tools and processes to maximize velocity. But none of these advancements address where developers spend most of their time— data . In fact, 73% of developers share time and again that working with data is the hardest part of building an application or feature. So why is data the problem? Traditionally, selecting a database, often an open-source relational one, is the first step in development. However, these databases can struggle with the characteristics of modern data: it’s high volume, unstructured, and constantly evolving. As applications mature and their data demands grow, development teams may encounter challenges with achieving scalability and maintaining service resilience. Some teams turn to NoSQL databases, but even then they find there are limited capabilities, pushing them back to relational databases. As the application gains traction, the business’s appetite for innovation grows, compelling development teams to incorporate an expanding array of database technologies. This results in an architectural sprawl, imposing on teams the challenges of mastering, sustaining, and harmonizing new technologies. Concurrently, the dynamic technology landscape undergoes constant evolution, demanding teams to swiftly adjust. As a result, self-contained, autonomous teams encounter these hurdles recurrently, highlighting the pressing need for streamlined solutions to mitigate complexity and enhance agility. Figure 2: The evolving tech landscape. Data sprawl: A major threat to developer productivity and business agility Data sprawl is slowing everyone down. The more systems we add, the harder it is for developers to keep up. Each new database brings its own unique language, format, and way of working. This creates a huge headache for managing everything—from buying new systems to making sure they all work together securely. It’s a constant battle to keep data accessible, consistent, and backed up across all these different platforms. Figure 3: Teams building on separate stacks leads to data sprawl and manageability issues across the organization It compromises every single one of the four outcomes your technology foundation should be providing, yielding the opposite results: Missed opportunities, lost customers: Fragmented development experiences consume time as engineers struggle with multiple technologies, frameworks, and extract, transform, and load mechanisms for duplicating data between systems. This slows down releases, degrades digital product quality, and impedes engineers from achieving product-market fit and effective competition. Flying blind: With your operational data siloed across multiple systems, you lack the data foundations necessary to use live data in shaping customer experiences or reacting to market changes. This is because you are unable to feed reliable, consistent, real-time data into your AI models to take action within the flow of the application or to provide the business with up-to-the-second visibility into operations. High attrition, high costs: Complex data architecture impacts development team culture, leading to siloed knowledge, inefficient collaboration, and decreased developer satisfaction. This complexity also consumes substantial resources in maintaining existing systems by diverting resources from new projects that are vital for business competition in new markets. Disruption from new technologies: Dependence on any one cloud provider can stifle innovation for development teams by restricting access to the latest technologies. Developers are confined to the tools and services offered by a single provider, hindering their ability to explore and integrate new, potentially more efficient, or advanced technologies. Speed: A unified developer experience for building high-quality software faster In today’s digital world, speed is king. Your customers expect seamless experiences, but clunky applications leave them frustrated. But traditional databases can be a bottleneck, struggling to keep pace with your ever-evolving data and slowing down development. The future of data is here, and it’s flexible: a data platform built for digital natives . It leverages a flexible document model, letting you store and work with your data exactly how you need it. This eliminates rigid structures and complex migrations, freeing your developers to focus on what matters—building amazing applications faster. Flexible document data models empower developers to handle today’s rapidly evolving application data ( 80%+ unstructured) that relational databases struggle with. MongoDB documents are richly typed, boosting developer productivity by eliminating the need for lengthy schema migrations when implementing new features. Developers get to use their preferred tools and languages. Through its drivers and integrations, MongoDB supports all of the most popular programming languages, frameworks, integrated development environments, and AI-code assistance tools. MongoDB scales! It starts small and scales globally. Built for elasticity and horizontal scaling, it handles massive workloads without app changes. Figure 4: A unified developer experience, integrating all necessary data services for building sophisticated modern applications Introducing MongoDB Atlas : a fully-managed cloud database built for the modern developer. It enables the integration of real-time data from devices with AI capabilities (through vector embeddings and large language models ) to personalize user experiences. Stream processing empowers constant data analysis, while in-app analytics provides real-time insights without needing separate data warehouses, all while automatically managing data movement and storage for cost-effectiveness. MongoDB Atlas simplifies database management with the following: Easy deployment via UI, API, CLI, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code tools. Automated operations for cost-effective performance and real-time monitoring. MongoDB Atlas customer success stories: Development with speed, scale, and efficiency Delivery Hero Delivery Hero, a global leader in online food delivery, leverages MongoDB Atlas to power its rapid service. Founded in 2011, Delivery Hero now serves millions of customers in over 70 countries through brands like PedidosYa, foodpanda, and Glovo. Having replaced its legacy SQL database, Delivery Hero optimized operations and bolstered performance by using MongoDB Atlas. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas Search, Delivery Hero revolutionized its search functionality, ensuring a seamless user experience for its extensive customer base through simplified indexing and real-time data accuracy. MongoDB’s scalability has empowered Delivery Hero to manage over 100 million products in its catalog without encountering latency issues, enabling the company to expand its services while maintaining peak performance. This agility, coupled with MongoDB’s cost-effectiveness, has enabled Delivery Hero to swiftly adapt to evolving customer demands, solidifying its position in the fiercely competitive delivery market. MongoDB Atlas Search was a game changer. We ran a proof of concept and discovered how easy it is to use. We can index in one click, and because it’s a feature of MongoDB, we know data is always up-to-date and accurate. Andrii Hrachov, Principal Software Engineer, Delivery Hero Read the full customer story to learn more. Coinbase Coinbase, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange boasting 245,000 ecosystem partners and managing assets worth $273 billion , trusts MongoDB to handle its extensive data workload. As the company grew, MongoDB scaled seamlessly to accommodate the increased demand. To further improve performance in the fast-paced crypto world, Coinbase partnered with MongoDB to develop a system that significantly accelerated data transfer to reporting tools, reducing processing time from days to a mere 5-6 hours. This near real-time data access enables Coinbase to rapidly analyze trends and make informed decisions, maintaining a competitive edge in the ever-evolving crypto landscape. Watch Coinbase's full session at MongoDB.local Austin, 2024 to learn more. MongoDB: Your flexible platform for digital growth With MongoDB, you can freely explore, experiment, develop, and deploy according to your digital-native business needs. If you would like to learn more about how MongoDB can empower your digital-native business to conquer market trends, visit: Innovate With AI: The Future Enterprise Application-Driven Intelligence: Defining the Next Wave of Modern Apps AI-Driven Real-Time Pricing with MongoDB and Vertex AI

November 7, 2024