MongoDB October News Roundup

MongoDB
October 31, 2013 | Updated: July 5, 2016
#Company

There was a lot going on in the MongoDB Community this October including MUGs, MongoDB Days, new releases and a new round of funding for MongoDB. Here’s what happened in October:

The MongoDB Blogroll:

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Employee Profile: Brendan Coleman

We’re excited to introduce members of our fantastic MongoDB team in a new series featuring an employee of the week on our blog. Structured in a Q&A format, the employees will share how they came to MongoDB, their role at the company and a few light-hearted questions about what they do when they’re not in our offices. Our first featured employee is Brendan Coleman, Director of Business Development. Brendan with his son Harvey What is your role at MongoDB? What department do you work in? I’ve been part of the Business Development team for over two years, specifically working with various types of partners that are integrating MongoDB into their value proposition. **Where were you before MongoDB? ** I worked at Alfresco, which is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management Company. What’s your hometown? I currently live in Atlanta, GA but Pittsburgh, PA [The Burgh] will always be my home. Did you have previous experience using MongoDB before you arrived? If so, how are things different now that you work at MongoDB? If not, how did you learn MongoDB and how was the education process MongoDB started coming up in conversations here [at Alfresco] and there before I jumped ship, but I mostly started from scratch. There was a lot of self-education, a few patient colleagues and a week of technical training. At that time, the education was at a stage where you learned as you went and picked up things by communicating with customers. On-boarding has improved significantly over the past couple years but you still have all departments pitching in, which is great. Have you had any personal projects where you’ve used MongoDB? Does elevating my monitor with various MongoDB books count? Bike or public transportation to work? Neither. I work from home when I’m not on the road. My daily commute consists of walking to the next room or roller blading to the local coffee shop. What’s a typical day (or week) for you? I start each day with an episode of Sit and Be Fit; helps me maintain my figure. Since Business Development allows me to work with all parts of the organization, things are interesting and every day brings something new. Why did you choose to come to MongoDB? What do you love most about MongoDB? With the risk of sounding cliché, I chose MongoDB because of the opportunity to disrupt the database market. It made no sense to me (at the time and now) why people continued to use and accept a tool that didn’t address the evolving requirements of the business. One thing that still excites me about MongoDB is the quality of people I work with and whom we continue to hire as we expand our team. It’s challenging to stay disciplined when it comes to hiring at scale and it’s very cool to be on the positive side of it all. And the swag’s not too bad either. What’s the most challenging project here at MongoDB that you’ve worked on, and how did you succeed? Explaining what I do and what MongoDB is to my Dad. He has the basic concept down and rocks the t-shirt so I’d call that a victory. What’s the most rewarding experience you’ve had working here so far? Working with the various people across MongoDB has been a very interesting and rewarding process over the past couple years. Taking a step back and seeing what we’ve accomplished in a short amount of time is very cool. What’s your favorite Seamless lunch order? I always miss the deadline to order. Name one secret skill you have, unrelated to work. I can juggle. Kindle or book? What’s your favorite book? Book: I like to keep them scattered throughout my apartment to break awkward silences at social gatherings. My favorite is Islands in the Stream, by Hemingway. If you were a Major League baseball player what song would they play when you step up to bat? Old School: Beastie Boys – sure shot New School: Lorde – Royals Describe your perfect weekend. A perfect weekend would include zero obligations and time outdoors with the people that make me happy. Oh - and some time to work on the base tan.

October 31, 2013
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How Edenlab Built a High-Load, Low-Code FHIR Server to Deliver Healthcare for 40 Million Plus Patients

The Kodjin FHIR server has speed and scale in its DNA. Edenlab, the Ukrainian company behind Kodjin , built our original FHIR solution to digitize and service the entire Ukrainian national health system. The learnings and technologies from that project informed our development of the Kodjin FHIR server. At Edenlab, we have always been driven by our passion for building solutions that excel in speed and scale. With Kodjin, we have embraced a modern tech stack to deliver unparalleled performance that can handle the demands of large-scale healthcare systems, providing efficient data management and seamless interoperability. Eugene Yesakov, Solution Architect, Author of Kodjin Built for speed and scale While most healthcare projects involve handling large volumes of data, including patient records, medical images, and sensor data, the Kodjin FHIR server is based on a system developed to handle tens of millions of patient records and thousands of requests per second, to ensure timely access and efficient decision-making for a population of over 40 million people. And all of this information had to be processed and exchanged in real-time or near real-time, without delays or bottlenecks. This article will explore some of the architectural decisions the Edenlab team took when building Kodjin, specifically the role MongoDB played in enhancing performance and ensuring scalability. We will examine the benefits of leveraging MongoDB's scalability, flexibility, and robust querying capabilities, as well as its ability to handle the increasing velocity and volume of healthcare data without compromising performance. About Kodjin FHIR server Kodjin is an ONC-certified and HIPAA-compliant FHIR Server that offers hassle-free healthcare data management. It has been designed to meet the growing demands of healthcare projects, allowing for the efficient handling of increasing data volumes and concurrent requests. Its architecture, built on a horizontally scalable microservices approach, utilizes cutting-edge technologies such as the Rust programming language, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Kafka, and Kubernetes. These technologies enable Kodjin to provide users with a low-code approach while harnessing the full potential of the FHIR specification. A deeper dive into the architecture approach - the role of MongoDB in Kodjin When deciding on the technology stack for the Kodjin FHIR Server, the Edenlab team knew that a document database would be required to serve as a transactional data store. In an FHIR Server, a transactional data store ensures that data operations occur in an atomic and consistent manner, allowing for the integrity and reliability of the data. Document databases are well-suited for this purpose as they provide a flexible schema and allow for storing complex data structures, such as those found in FHIR data. FHIR resources are represented in a hierarchical structure and can be quite intricate, with nested elements and relationships. Document databases, like MongoDB, excel at handling such complex and hierarchical data structures, making them an ideal choice for storing FHIR data. In addition to supporting document storage, the Edenlab team needed the chosen database to provide transactional capabilities for FHIR data operations. FHIR transactions, which encompass a set of related data operations that should either succeed or fail as a whole, are essential for maintaining data consistency and integrity. They can also be used to roll back changes if any part of the transaction fails. MongoDB provides support for multi-document transactions , enabling atomic operations across multiple documents within a single transaction. This aligns well with the transactional requirements of FHIR data and ensures data consistency in Kodjin. Implementation of GridFS as a storage for the terminologies in Terminology service Terminology service plays a vital role in FHIR projects, requiring a reliable and efficient storage solution for terminologies used. Kodjin employs GridFS , a file system within MongoDB designed for storing large files, which makes it ideal to handle terminologies. GridFS offers a convenient way to store and manage terminology files, ensuring easy accessibility and seamless integration within the FHIR ecosystem. By utilizing MongoDB's GridFS, Kodjin ensures efficient storage and retrieval of terminologies, enhancing the overall functionality of the terminology service. Kodjin FHIR server performance To evaluate the efficiency and responsiveness of the Kodjin FHIR server in various scenarios we conducted multiple performance tests using Locust, an open-source load testing tool. One of the performance metrics measured was the retrieval of resources by their unique ids using the GET by ID operation. Kodjin with MongoDB achieved a performance of 1721.8 requests per second (RPS) for this operation. This indicates that the server can efficiently retrieve specific resources, enabling quick access to desired data. The search operation, which involves querying ElasticSearch to obtain the ids of the searched resources and retrieving them from MongoDB, exhibited a performance of 1896.4 RPS. This highlights the effectiveness of polyglot persistence in Kodjin, leveraging ElasticSearch for fast and efficient search queries and MongoDB for resource retrieval. The system demonstrated its ability to process search queries and retrieve relevant results promptly. In terms of resource creation, Kodjin with MongoDB showed a performance of 1405.6 RPS for POST resource operations. This signifies that the system can effectively handle numerous resource-creation requests. The efficient processing and insertion of new resources into the MongoDB database ensure seamless data persistence and scalability. Overall, the performance tests confirm that Kodjin with MongoDB delivers efficient and responsive performance across various FHIR operations. The high RPS values obtained demonstrate the system's capability to handle significant workloads and provide timely access to resources through GET by ID, search, and POST operations. Conclusion Kodjin leverages a modern tech stack including Rust, Kafka, and Kubernetes to deliver the highest levels of performance. At the heart of Kodjin is MongoDB, which serves as a transactional data store. MongoDB's capabilities, such as multi-document transactions and flexible schema, ensure the integrity and consistency of FHIR data operations. The utilization of GridFS within MongoDB ensures efficient storage and retrieval of terminologies, optimizing the functionality of the Terminology service. To experience the power and potential of the Kodjin FHIR server firsthand, we invite you to contact the Edenlab team for a demo. For more information On MongoDB’s work in healthcare, and to understand why the world’s largest healthcare companies trust MongoDB, read our whitepaper on radical interoperability .

May 31, 2023