Minority in Tech? Apply to the Diversity Scholarship for MongoDB Europe!

Danielle James
August 10, 2016 | Updated: December 8, 2016
#Community #Company

After personally getting to know our amazing Diversity Scholars at MongoDB World, I couldn’t wait to get started on our next opportunity to contribute to changing the ratio in technology. Today, I’m excited to announce that we’re now accepting applications for the Diversity Scholarship for MongoDB Europe!

Award

Scholarship recipients receive:

Complimentary admission to MongoDB Europe
Invitation to Diversity Scholars lunch
Introduction to MongoDB speakers at the event
A MongoDB certification voucher
Three months of access to on-demand MongoDB University courses
A feature in a blog post
At the event, you’ll get to have lunch with your fellow Diversity Scholars and conference speakers. It’s a great way to get to know each other, make new connections, and share giant ideas!

Apply Now

To qualify you must be 18 years old or older, and belong to an underrepresented group in the technology industry. This includes women, people with disabilities, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, people from low-income backgrounds, and individuals from the LGBTQ community.

The deadline to apply is Friday, October 7, 2016.

I look forward to receiving your applications, and to seeing you at MongoDB Europe!

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MongoDB Atlas Best Practices: Part 1

Preparing for your MongoDB Deployment: Schema Design & Access Patterns MongoDB Atlas radically simplifies the operation of MongoDB. As with any hosted database as a service there are still decisions you need to take to ensure the best performance and availability for your application. This blog series provides a number of recommendations that will serve as a solid foundation for getting the most out of the MongoDB Atlas service. We’ll cover four main areas over this series of blog posts: In this part 1 post, we’ll get started with preparing for your deployment, focusing specifically on schema design and application access patterns. In part 2 , we’ll discuss additional considerations as you prepare for your deployment, including indexing, data migration, and instance selection. In part 3 , we’ll dive into how you scale your MongoDB Atlas deployment, and achieve your required availability SLAs. In the final part 4 , we’ll wrap up with best practices for operational management and ensuring data security. If you want to get a head start and learn about all of these topics now, just go ahead and download the MongoDB Atlas Best Practices guide . So What is MongoDB Atlas? MongoDB Atlas provides all of the features of MongoDB, without the operational heavy lifting required for any new application. MongoDB Atlas is available on-demand through a pay-as-you-go model and billed on an hourly basis, letting you focus on your code and your customers. It’s easy to get started – use a simple GUI to select the appropriate instance size, geographic region, and features you need. MongoDB Atlas provides: Security features to protect access to your data Built in replication for always-on availability, tolerating complete data center failure Backups and point in time recovery to protect against data corruption Fine-grained monitoring to help you know when to scale. Additional instances can be provisioned with the push of a button Automated patching and one-click upgrades for new major versions of the database, enabling you to take advantage of the latest and greatest MongoDB features A choice of cloud providers, regions, and billing options MongoDB Atlas is versatile. It’s great for everything from a quick Proof of Concept, to test/QA environments, to complete production clusters. If you decide you want to bring operations back under your control, it is easy to move your databases onto your own infrastructure and manage them using MongoDB Ops Manager or MongoDB Cloud Manager . The user experience across MongoDB Atlas, Cloud Manager, and Ops Manager is consistent, ensuring that disruption is minimal if you decide to migrate to your own infrastructure. So now that you know what MongoDB Atlas is, let’s get started preparing for our deployment. Schema Design Developers and data architects should work together to develop the right data model, and they should invest time in this exercise early in the project. The requirements of the application should drive the data model, updates, and queries of your MongoDB system. Given MongoDB's dynamic schema, developers and data architects can continue to iterate on the data model throughout the development and deployment processes to optimize performance and storage efficiency, as well as support the addition of new application features. All of this can be done without expensive schema migrations. Document Model MongoDB stores data as documents in a binary representation called BSON. The BSON encoding extends the popular JSON representation to include additional types such as int , long , and date . BSON documents contain one or more fields, and each field contains a value of a specific data type, including arrays, sub-documents and binary data. It may be helpful to think of documents as roughly equivalent to rows in a relational database, and fields as roughly equivalent to columns. However, MongoDB documents tend to have all related data for a given record or object in a single document, whereas in a relational database that data is usually normalized across rows in many tables. For example, data that belongs to a parent-child relationship in two RDBMS tables can frequently be collapsed (embedded) into a single document in MongoDB. For operational applications, the document model makes JOINs redundant in many cases. Where possible, store all data for a record in a single document. MongoDB provides ACID compliance at the document level. When data for a record is stored in a single document the entire record can be retrieved in a single seek operation, which is very efficient. In some cases it may not be practical to store all data in a single document, or it may negatively impact other operations. Make the trade-offs that are best for your application. Rather than storing a large array of items in an indexed field, storing groups of values across multiple fields results in more efficient updates. Collections Collections are groupings of documents. Typically all documents in a collection have similar or related purposes for an application. It may be helpful to think of collections as being analogous to tables in a relational database. Dynamic Schema & Document Validation MongoDB documents can vary in structure. For example, documents that describe users might all contain the user id and the last date they logged into the system, but only some of these documents might contain the user's shipping address, and perhaps some of those contain multiple shipping addresses. MongoDB does not require that all documents conform to the same structure. Furthermore, there is no need to declare the structure of documents to the system – documents are self-describing. DBAs and developers have the option to define Document Validation rules for a collection – enabling them to enforce checks on selected parts of a document's structure, data types, data ranges, and the presence of mandatory fields. As a result, DBAs can apply data governance standards, while developers maintain the benefits of a flexible document model. These are covered in the blog post Document Validation: Adding Just the Right Amount of Control Over Your Documents . Indexes MongoDB uses B-tree indexes to optimize queries. Indexes are defined on a collection’s document fields. MongoDB includes support for many indexes, including compound, geospatial, TTL, text search, sparse, partial, unique, and others. For more information see the section on indexing in the 2nd instalment of this blog series. Transactions Atomicity of updates may influence the schema for your application. MongoDB guarantees ACID compliant updates to data at the document level. It is not possible to update multiple documents in a single atomic operation, however the ability to embed related data into MongoDB documents eliminates this requirement in many cases. For use cases that do require multiple documents to be updated atomically, it is possible to implement Two Phase Commit logic in the application . Visualizing your Schema: MongoDB Compass The MongoDB Compass GUI allows users to understand the structure of existing data in the database and perform ad hoc queries against it – all with zero knowledge of MongoDB's query language. Typical users could include architects building a new MongoDB project or a DBA who has inherited a database from an engineering team, and who must now maintain it in production. You need to understand what kind of data is present, define what indexes might be appropriate, and identify if Document Validation rules should be added to enforce a consistent document structure. *Figure 1: View schema & interactively build and execute database queries with MongoDB Compass* Without MongoDB Compass, users wishing to understand the shape of their data would have to connect to the MongoDB shell and write queries to reverse engineer the document structure, field names, and data types. Similarly, anyone wanting to run custom queries on the data would need to understand MongoDB's query language. MongoDB Compass can be used for free during development and it is also available for production use with MongoDB Professional or MongoDB Enterprise Advanced subscriptions. Application Access Patterns Schema design has a huge influence on database performance. How the application accesses the data can also have a major impact. Searching on indexed attributes is typically the single most important pattern as it avoids collection scans. Taking it a step further, using covered queries avoids the need to access the collection data altogether. Covered queries return results from the indexes directly without accessing documents and are therefore very efficient. For a query to be covered, all the fields included in the query must be present in an index, and all the fields returned by the query must also be present in that index. To determine whether a query is a covered query, use the explain() method. If the explain() output displays true for the indexOnly field, the query is covered by an index, and MongoDB queries only that index to match the query and return the results. Rather than retrieving the entire document in your application, updating fields, then saving the document back to the database, instead issue the update to specific fields. This has the advantage of less network usage and reduced database overhead. Document Size The maximum BSON document size in MongoDB is 16 MB. Users should avoid certain application patterns that would allow documents to grow unbounded. For example, in an e-commerce application it would be difficult to estimate how many reviews each product might receive from customers. Furthermore, it is typically the case that only a subset of reviews is displayed to a user, such as the most popular or the most recent reviews. Rather than modeling the product and customer reviews as a single document it would be better to model each review or groups of reviews as a separate document with a reference to the product document; while also storing the key reviews in the product document for fast access. In practice most documents are a few kilobytes or less. Consider documents more like rows in a table than the tables themselves. Rather than maintaining lists of records in a single document, instead make each record a document. For large media items, such as video or images, consider using GridFS , a convention implemented by all the drivers that automatically stores the binary data across many smaller documents Field names are repeated across documents and consume space – RAM in particular. By using smaller field names your data will consume less space, which allows for a larger number of documents to fit in RAM. Data Lifecycle Management MongoDB provides features to facilitate the management of data lifecycles, including Time to Live indexes, and capped collections. Time to Live (TTL) If documents in a collection should only persist for a pre-defined period of time, the TTL feature can be used to automatically delete documents of a certain age rather than scheduling a process to check the age of all documents and run a series of deletes. For example, if user sessions should only exist for one hour, the TTL can be set to 3600 seconds for a date field called lastActivity that exists in documents used to track user sessions and their last interaction with the system. A background thread will automatically check all these documents and delete those that have been idle for more than 3600 seconds. Another example use case for TTL is a price quote that should automatically expire after a period of time. Capped Collections In some cases a rolling window of data should be maintained in the system based on data size. Capped collections are fixed-size collections that support high-throughput inserts and reads based on insertion order. A capped collection behaves like a circular buffer: data is inserted into the collection, that insertion order is preserved, and when the total size reaches the threshold of the capped collection, the oldest documents are deleted to make room for the newest documents. For example, store log information from a high-volume system in a capped collection to quickly retrieve the most recent log entries. Dropping a Collection It is very efficient to drop a collection in MongoDB. If your data lifecycle management requires periodically deleting large volumes of documents, it may be best to model those documents as a single collection. Dropping a collection is much more efficient than removing all documents or a large subset of a collection, just as dropping a table is more efficient than deleting all the rows in a table in a relational database. Disk space is automatically reclaimed after a collection is dropped. Next Steps That’s a wrap for part 1 of the MongoDB Atlas best practices blog series. In Part 2, we’ll continue along the path of preparing for our first deployment by discussing indexing and data migration. Download MongoDB Atlas Best Practice Guide

August 8, 2016

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Congratulations to the 2023 APAC Innovation Award Winners

I’m thrilled to announce the nine winners of the 2023 MongoDB APAC Innovation Awards . The MongoDB Innovation Awards honor projects and people who dream big. They celebrate the groundbreaking use of data to build compelling applications and the creativity of professionals expanding the limits of technology with MongoDB. This year, we have broken the awards down regionally to celebrate organizations in APAC, from startups to industry-leading enterprises, across a wide variety of industries, who are delivering big results. We are delighted to announce the winners below: 2023 MongoDB APAC Innovation Award Winners: Positive Impact Open Government Products Open Government Products (OGP) is an in-house team of engineers, designers, and product managers, who is a part of the Singapore Government, and is responsible for building technologies for the public good. OGP used MongoDB’s developer data platform, MongoDB Atlas to create its digital form builder, FormSG. Used by the Singapore government and public healthcare institutions, FormSG securely collects data from residents and businesses and helps public officers to create digital government forms in minutes. It eliminates the use of paper forms and the manual process of transcribing physical documents, which had raised concerns around data privacy and protection. During the pandemic, FormSG enabled public officers to collect more than 100,000 daily temperature declarations nationwide. Today, FormSG has served more than 120,000 public officers from 155 agencies and it has created more than 500,000 digital forms to help the government collect data on travel and health declarations by visitors to the country, applications for COVID-19 swab tests, and applications for financial assistance. Organization Transformation Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is one of Australia’s largest banks, with around 7,000 employees helping more than 2.2 million customers achieve their financial goals. The bank has been on a multi-year journey of transformation using MongoDB's developer data platform to improve efficiency and deliver a better customer experience as they fulfill their vision to become Australia’s bank of choice. Recently, the cloud team launched Ready-Set-MongoDB (or RSM). This event-driven framework allows developers to streamline the consumption of internal or external APIs, and applies data transformations and storage automatically within a MongoDB collection of their choice. Using MongoDB Atlas Search, the bank also enabled developers to gain insights across its multi-cloud deployments, identifying cost savings, and providing inventory information to account owners and technical stakeholders. Within the first 18 months of launching these programmes, the automation had saved the organization more than 1,100 developers days. It also helped reduce human involvement, removed stale data, and allowed engineers to focus on the things that matter. The development of Ready-Set-MongoDB is ongoing and improving, as new Bendigo multi-cloud challenges arise and new MongoDB products are released. The application is a perfect representation of how Bendigo's Technology Department is using modern technology, rapid development, and innovation-led problem solving to drive organizational transformation. Heroes in Health Redcliffe Lifetech Private Limited Over the last few years, Redcliffe Labs has become India's fastest growing technology-driven diagnostics service provider. Redcliffe Labs is on a mission to serve 500 Million Indians by 2030 with fusion of technology and world- class laboratories. The company already serves thousands of people daily, with more than 73 labs and close to 1500 walk-in centers across 180 cities. Redcliffe Labs has relied on MongoDB Atlas’ flexible document model to power its innovative Smart Health Report, a patient resource that provides a number of indicators and trackers to gauge holistic health. The MongoDB developer data platform's best in class security, compliance, and privacy controls allows Redcliffe's team to confidently handle even the most sensitive patient data. MongoDB Atlas takes care of many of the traditional database management challenges, which means that developers can spend their time building diagnostics for patients, rather than managing databases. Redcliffe Labs is focusing on incorporating next-generation technologies in the diagnostics space with an AI platform that will make Interactive Diagnostics reports, Advanced Health Profiling and more detailed Diagnostics and Health Alerts. Industry Disruptor Cathay Pacific Cathay Pacific , Hong Kong’s home carrier operating in more than 60 destinations worldwide, has been on an impressive journey to become one of the very first airlines to create a truly paperless flight deck. Until recently, a flight from Hong Kong to New York would require a crew to review more than 150 pages of finely printed text and charts before their flight and make ongoing updates throughout the trip. In 2019, Cathay Pacific conducted the first zero paper flight, removing 50kg of manuals, charts, maps, and flight briefing paperwork. They achieved this enormous feat with the help of one seamless and highly customized iPad application: Flight Folder. Built on MongoDB Atlas, Flight Folder is designed to improve the pilot briefing experience. MongoDB helped consolidate dozens of different information sources into one place, and made it possible for flight crews to easily share their experiences with others. It also included a digital refueling feature that helps crews become much more efficient with fueling strategies – saving significant flight time and costs. The use of MongoDB Device Sync enables seamless syncing and no data loss even when the app goes on- and offline mid-flight. Since the Flight Folder launch, Cathay Pacific has completed more than 340,000 flights with full digital integration in the flight deck. In addition to the greatly improved flight crew experience, flight times have been reduced, and digital refueling saves eight minutes of ground time on average. All these efficiencies have helped the company avoid the release of 15,000 tons of carbon. From Batch to Real-Time Adani Digital Labs Adani Digital Labs is the India-based digital innovation arm of the larger Adani group. The lab’s team's mission is to create one single platform – a SuperApp called AdaniOne – to empower a billion stories in India. To address several use cases and the huge scale that will be required by the superapp, the Adani Digital team selected MongoDB Atlas as its the main transactional database that will further enhance the application. A key component of the app is how it can bring together disparate data in order to provide a single view of activity across the application. In the first process, developers had taken out the data in batches and sent it to their database However, this was too slow and unpredictable as far as business requirements are concerned. Also, the consolidated view of customer history, orders, inventory, and supply chain network updates was likely to impact their customer's ability to generate revenue. Therefore, in order to find a better solution, Adani Digital Labs built a more modern architecture in line with MongoDB. Using MongoDB's Change Streams and the data platform's native Kafka connector, they created an event-based architecture that pushes the data out in real-time for analysis. Adani Digital Labs is still in the early phases of the SuperApp's rollout and collaborating with MongoDB as its developer data platform continues to help the firm to grow and deliver insights in real time. Industry 4.0 Dongwha Founded in 1948, the Dongwha Group has evolved from a singular focus on the wood and timber industry into a global leader across a number of sectors including building materials, chemicals and media. As part of its wider digital transformation strategy, Dongwha required smarter factories that would improve and optimize their production efficiency. Dongwha built an innovative Smart Factory Software platform that collects and analyzes data to enhance quality and production management capabilities. Originally, the platform was built with the community version of MongoDB. However, in order to scale and adapt, the team recently migrated to MongoDB Atlas in the cloud. This enabled them to store large volumes in the fastest and most secure way, optimize their solution for time series data, and make it easy to run machine learning across their data. Dongwha completed the migration seamlessly, without any disruption or downtime to their factories, and it has now been launched across five different sites. Over the last year, the application has significantly increased its availability and reliability while performance has improved by as much as 6x . As they look to the future, Dongwha plans to roll out the software to more of its international factories. Digital Native myBillBook India is home to more than 60 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) but only a small portion of those SMBs are taking advantage of digitization and many still operate using pen and paper. In addition, many businesses in India still struggle with fluctuations in internet services, outages, and latency. FloBiz is on a mission to change that with myBillBook , a one-stop solution that helps SMBs create professional invoices, manage stock, collect payments, automate reminders through smart banking, engage with their customers, manage staff attendance and payroll and generate more than 25 business reports for accounting and decision making. The app is also mobile-first, so businesses can access them from their mobile devices and allows users to manage billing and inventory in both online and offline environments. The myBillbook app is powered by MongoDB Atlas, providing the flexible and scalable foundation for the business to do everything from building new features to performing complex analytical queries. In addition, MongoDB Realm, the mobile database within the data platform, supports offline usage and syncing to ensure there is never data loss or functionality for users due to poor internet connection. Because of its success in supporting customers with business critical operations, more than 6.5 million business owners in India are now using myBillbook for their billing, accounting, collection and business growth. Customer Focused KASIKORN Business-Technology Group Established in 1945, Kasikornbank (KBank) is one of the largest and oldest banks in Thailand. Their mission is to strive towards service excellence and empower every customer’s life and business. One of KBank’s subsidiaries, KASIKORN Business-Technology Group (KBTG) , developed a mobile banking application – MAKE by KBank. MongoDB Atlas’ flexibility and ease of development enabled MAKE’s development team to choose the best type of database for its tasks, to automate data tiering with Atlas Online Archive, and to reduce hours spent on operational maintenance. With more time to focus on delivering new innovations to customers, they created unique features like Cloud Pocket which can allocate funds into unlimited customizable pockets for separate usage. They also built Pop Pay, a feature that allows users to easily search for nearby friends and transfer money by clicking their profile picture as well as “Expense Summary" a spending analysis services that helps inform and manage users’ financial habits. As of January 2023, MAKE has acquired more than 1 million users, and increased the number of transactions in MAKE from 900,000 to more than 7.5 million in a span of one year. Massive Scale China Mobile China Mobile provides mobile voice and multimedia services via its nationwide mobile telecommunications network across mainland China and Hong Kong. It is the world's largest mobile network operator by total number of subscribers. The telecommunications leader is using MongoDB to support one of its largest and most critical push services, which sends out billing details to more than 1 billion users every month. Prior to MongoDB, the tech team relied on Oracle, but as the user numbers increased, performance degraded. Despite large investments, it was still taking too long to do basic requests like finalize and deliver bills to users. In 2019, after comprehensive testing, China Mobile migrated to MongoDB. By taking advantage of MongoDB's native sharding, they were able to improve performance by 80% and go from 50 Oracle machines, to just 12 machines for the same workload. The service now handles all current requirements and is set up to scale with future growth. With the support of MongoDB, China Mobile is growing steadily,with more than 168 million monthly users and has one of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the China Mobile group.

March 30, 2023