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Why Open Source Is Essential To Big Data

Gartner analyst Merv Adrian recently highlighted some of the recent movements in Hadoop Land, with several companies introducing products "intended to improve Hadoop speed." This seems odd, as that wouldn't be my top pick for how to improve Hadoop or, really, most of the Big Data technologies out there. By many accounts, the biggest need in Hadoop is improved ease of use, not improved performance, something Adrian himself confirms : Hadoop already delivers exceptional performance on commodity hardware, compared to its stodgy proprietary competition. Where it's still lacking is in ease of use. Not that Hadoop is alone in this. As Mare Lucas asserts , Today, despite the information deluge, enterprise decision makers are often unable to access the data in a useful way. The tools are designed for those who speak the language of algorithms and statistical analysis. It’s simply too hard for the everyday user to “ask” the data any questions – from the routine to the insightful. The end result? The speed of big data moves at a slower pace … and the power is locked in the hands of the few. Lucas goes on to argue that the solution to the data scientist shortage is to take the science out of data science; that is, consumerize Big Data technology such that non-PhD-wielding business people can query their data and get back meaningful results. The Value Of Open Source To Deciphering Big Data Perhaps. But there's actually an intermediate step before we reach the Promised Land of full consumerization of Big Data. It's called open source. Even with technology like Hadoop that is open source yet still too complex, the benefits of using Hadoop far outweigh the costs (financial and productivity-wise) associated with licensing an expensive data warehousing or analytics platform. As Alex Popescu writes , Hadoop "allows experimenting and trying out new ideas, while continuing to accumulate and storing your data. It removes the pressure from the developers. That’s agility." But these benefits aren't unique to Hadoop. They're inherent in any open-source project. Now imagine we could get open-source software that fits our Big Data needs and is exceptionally easy to use plus is almost certainly already being used within our enterprises...? That is the promise of MongoDB, consistently cited as one of the industry's top-two Big Data technologies . MongoDB makes it easy to get started with a Big Data project. Using MongoDB To Innovate Consider the City of Chicago. The Economist wrote recently about the City of Chicago's predictive analytics platform, WindyGrid. What The Economist didn't mention is that WindyGrid started as a pet project on chief data officer Brett Goldstein's laptop. Goldstein started with a single MongoDB node, and iterated from there, turning it into one of the most exciting data-driven applications in the industry today. Given that we often don't know exactly which data to query, or how to query, or how to put data to work in our applications, this is precisely how a Big Data project should work. Start small, then iterate toward something big. This kind of tinkering simply is difficult to impossible with a relational database, as The Economist's Kenneth Cukier points out in his book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think : Conventional, so-called relational, databases are designed for a world in which data is sparse, and thus can be and will be curated carefully. It is a world in which the questions one wants to answer using the data have to be clear at the outset, so that the database is designed to answer them - and only them - efficiently. But with a flexible document database like MongoDB, it suddenly becomes much easier to iterate toward Big Data insights. We don't need to go out and hire data scientists. Rather, we simply need to apply existing, open-source technology like MongoDB to our Big Data problems, which jibes perfectly with Gartner analyst Svetlana Sicular's mantra that it's easier to train existing employees on Big Data technologies than it is to train data scientists on one's business. Except, in the case of MongoDB, odds are that enterprises are already filled with people that understand MongoDB, as 451 Research's LinkedIn analysis suggests: In sum, Big Data needn't be daunting or difficult. It's a download away.

May 2, 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