What’s New From MongoDB at Microsoft Build 2024

Jad Jarouche
May 21, 2024

This week, thousands of engineers, database administrators, and developers are gathering in Seattle for Microsoft Build, Microsoft’s annual developer event. In addition to being on site for meetings and learning sessions, MongoDB is excited to showcase our latest innovations for building generative AI apps and more.

First, we’re happy to announce that MongoDB now offers dedicated Search Nodes on Microsoft Azure. We offer both compute-optimized nodes for text or application search workloads, and memory-optimized nodes for vector, semantic search, or gen AI workloads. Search Nodes enhance performance and availability through workload isolation while reducing architectural complexity.

The availability of Search Nodes on Azure is the latest example of how the partnership between MongoDB and Microsoft helps organizations of all sizes boost developer productivity and build modern applications faster. Keep reading for more on how MongoDB’s capabilities and integrations with Microsoft are helping customers create, innovate, and scale applications.

Integrating services and technology to speed AI development

The last year of AI innovation set a clear imperative for every organization—to meet customer expectations, they need to modernize their applications. However, many companies aren’t sure where to start with AI, so MongoDB recently announced the launch of the MongoDB AI Application Program (MAAP) alongside industry-leading AI partners. MAAP will provide customers with strategic advisory, professional services, and an integrated end-to-end technology stack from MongoDB and key partners like Microsoft.

We’ve also made several technology announcements to enable building gen AI applications, including native support for MongoDB Atlas Vector Search in Microsoft Semantic Kernel, and a dedicated MongoDB Atlas integration for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plugin. With the new integration, developers can seamlessly and securely enhance the power of large language models from OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, and Hugging Face with proprietary data in Atlas to build powerful retrieval-augmented generation applications using Python or C#.

Developing faster with intelligent tools and frameworks

In addition to helping developers build powerful gen AI applications through services like Atlas Vector Search, we’ve been working to enhance developer productivity, making it easier than ever to build applications with MongoDB.

For example, we’ve introduced intelligent features to first-party tools like MongoDB Compass and Atlas Charts that support natural language. We also recently announced AI-powered SQL query conversions in Relational Migrator to help teams easily move their workloads to MongoDB.

MongoDB is expanding the use of AI to enhance its integration with the world’s most popular integrated development environment, Visual Studio Code. We’re excited to announce the MongoDB Participant for the Github CoPilot chat experience, designed to empower developers to generate queries from natural language, understand collection schemas, and instantly access MongoDB documentation. Sign up for the private preview here.

MongoDB also supports a variety of programming frameworks to improve productivity and accelerate application development—while ensuring data consistency and quality. Now generally available, the MongoDB Provider for Entity Framework Core (EF Core), encourages C# developers to build their next project on MongoDB. This new offering helps C# developers—39% of whom use EF Core—unlock the full power of MongoDB using the EF Core APIs and design patterns they already know and love.

Streamlining comprehensive data analysis

For years, MongoDB and Microsoft have facilitated the large-scale analysis of application-generated data to aid business development. Tools like Microsoft Power BI provide a comprehensive view of business intelligence data for developers and analysts with complex data estates using relational databases alongside MongoDB. MongoDB’s Power BI Connector for Atlas—previously supporting Import Mode—now also supports DirectQuery, which we announced a few weeks ago at MongoDB.local NYC. This allows for real-time querying of MongoDB data and is ideal for large datasets.

To further enable customers working in the Microsoft ecosystem, we’ve recently made Atlas Data Federation and Atlas Online Archive generally available on Azure. These services enable users to query, transform, and create views across multiple Atlas databases and Azure cloud storage solutions, like Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage Gen2, simplifying data management and archiving within the Azure ecosystem.

Building the future together

MongoDB's partnership with Microsoft has made developing modern applications faster and easier. We're thrilled to announce these new capabilities at Microsoft Build 2024, and look forward to helping our joint customers build amazing things together this year.

“MongoDB’s relationship with Microsoft has never been better, and with these latest integrations, our momentum continues to grow,” said Alan Chhabra, MongoDB’s EVP of Worldwide Partners. “Already, many of the largest enterprises and most advanced startups in the world run MongoDB Atlas on Microsoft Azure. These latest innovations will empower even more of our customers to take full advantage of their data to build truly transformational generative AI-powered applications.”

MongoDB’s partnership with Microsoft sets projects up for success today and tomorrow by delivering robust, integrated solutions that cater to developers' needs. MongoDB and Microsoft are pushing the boundaries for innovation and service for the developer community.

To learn more about our recent announcements and for the latest product updates, visit our What’s New page. And head to our campaign page to learn more about how to build smarter and develop faster with MongoDB Atlas on Microsoft Azure.

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Payments Modernization and the Role of the Operational Data Layer

To stay relevant and competitive, payment solution providers must enhance their payment processes to adapt to changing customer expectations, regulatory demands, and advancing technologies. The imperative for modernization is clear: payment systems must become faster, more secure, and seamlessly integrated across platforms. Driven by multiple factors—real-time payments, regulatory shifts like Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), heightened customer expectations, the power of open banking, and the disruptive force of fintech startups—the need for payment modernization has never been more pressing. But transformation is not without its challenges. Complex systems, industry reliance on outdated technology, high upgrade costs, and technical debt all pose formidable obstacles. This article will explore modernization approaches and how MongoDB helps smooth transformations. Approaches to modernization As businesses work to modernize their payment systems, they need to overcome the complexities inherent in updating legacy systems. Forward-thinking organizations embrace innovative strategies to streamline their operations, enhance scalability, and facilitate agile responses to evolving market demands. Two such approaches gaining prominence in the realm of payment system modernization are domain-driven design and microservices architecture : Domain-driven design: This approach focuses on a business's core operations to develop scalable and easier-to-manage systems. Domain-driven design ensures that technology serves strategic business goals by aligning system development with business needs. At its core, this approach seeks to break down complex business domains into manageable components, or "domains," each representing a distinct area of business functionality. Microservices architecture: Unlike traditional monolithic architectures, characterized by tightly coupled and interdependent components, a microservices architecture decomposes applications into a collection of loosely coupled services, each of which is responsible for a specific business function or capability. It introduces more flexibility and allows for quicker updates, facilitating agile responses to changing business requirements. Discover how Wells Fargo launched their next-generation card payments by building an operational data store with MongoDB . Modernizing with an operational data layer In the payments modernization process, the significance of an operational data layer (ODL) cannot be overstated. An ODL is an architectural pattern that centrally integrates and organizes siloed enterprise data, making it available to consuming applications. The simplest representation of this pattern looks something like the sample reference architecture below. Figure 1: Operational Data Layer structure An ODL is deployed in front of legacy systems to enable new business initiatives and to meet new requirements that the existing architecture can’t handle—without the difficulty and risk of fully replacing legacy systems. It can reduce the workload on source systems, improve availability, reduce end-user response times, combine data from multiple systems into a single repository, serve as a foundation for re-architecting a monolithic application into a suite of microservices, and more. The ODL becomes a system of innovation, allowing the business to take an iterative approach to digital transformation. Here's why an ODL is considered ideal for payment operations: Unified data management: Payment systems involve handling a vast amount of diverse data, including transaction details, customer information, and regulatory compliance data. An ODL provides a centralized repository for storing and managing this data, eliminating silos and ensuring data integrity. Real-time processing: An ODL enables real-time processing of transactions, allowing businesses to handle high numbers of transactions swiftly and efficiently. This capability is essential for meeting customer expectations for instant payments and facilitating seamless transactions across various channels. Scalability and flexibility: Payment systems must accommodate fluctuating transaction volumes and evolving business needs. An ODL offers scalability and flexibility, allowing businesses to scale their infrastructure as demand grows. Enhanced security: An ODL incorporates robust security features —such as encryption, access controls, and auditing capabilities—to safeguard data integrity and confidentiality. By centralizing security measures within the ODL, businesses can ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and mitigate security risks effectively. Support for payments data monetization: Payment systems generate a wealth of data that can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, transaction trends, and business performance. An ODL facilitates real-time analytics and reporting by providing a unified platform for collecting, storing, and analyzing this data. Transform with MongoDB MongoDB’s fundamental technology principles ensure companies can reap the advantages of microservices and domain-driven design—specifically, our flexible data model and built-in redundancy, automation, and scalability. Indeed, the document model is tailor-made for the intricacies of payment data, ensuring adaptability and scalability as market demands evolve. Here’s how MongoDB helps with domain-driven design and microservice implementation to adopt industry best practices: Ease of use: MongoDB’s document model makes it simple to model or remodel data to fit the needs of payment applications. Documents are a natural way of describing data. They present a single data structure, with related data embedded as sub-documents and arrays, making it simpler and faster for developers to model how data in the application will be mapped to data stored in the database. In addition, MongoDB guarantees the multi-record ACID transactional semantics that developers are familiar with, making it easier to reason about data. Flexibility: MongoDB’s dynamic schema is ideal for handling the requirements of microservices and a domain-driven design. Domain-driven design emphasizes modeling the domain to reflect the business requirements, which may evolve over time. MongoDB's flexible schema allows you to store domain objects as documents without rigid schema constraints, facilitating agile development and evolution of the domain model. Speed: Using MongoDB for an ODL means you can get better performance when accessing data, and write less code to do so. A document is a single place for the database to read and write data for an entity. This locality of data ensures the complete document can be accessed in a single database operation that avoids the need internally to pull data from many different tables and rows. Data access and microservice-based APIs: MongoDB integrates seamlessly with modern technologies and frameworks commonly used in microservices architectures. MongoDB's flexible data model and ability to handle various data types, including structured and unstructured data, is a great fit for orchestrating your open API ecosystem to make data flow between banks, third parties, and consumers possible. Scalability: Even if an ODL starts at a small scale, you need to be prepared for growth as new source systems are integrated, adding data volume, and new consuming systems are developed, increasing workload. MongoDB provides horizontal scale-out on low-cost, commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure using sharding to meet the needs of an ODL with large data sets and high throughput requirements. High availability: Microservices architectures require high availability to ensure that individual services remain accessible even in the event of failures. MongoDB provides built-in replication and failover capabilities, ensuring data availability and minimal downtime in case of server failures. Payment modernization is not merely a trend but a strategic imperative. By embracing modern payment solutions and leveraging the power of an ODL with MongoDB, organizations can unlock new growth opportunities, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver superior customer experiences. Learn how to build an operational data layer with MongoDB using this Payments Modernization Solution Accelerator . Learn more about how MongoDB is powering industries on our solution library .

May 15, 2024
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AI-Powered Media Personalization: MongoDB and Vector Search

In recent years, the media industry has grappled with a range of serious challenges, from adapting to digital platforms and on-demand consumption, to monetizing digital content, and competing with tech giants and new media upstarts. Economic pressures from declining sources of revenue like advertising, trust issues due to misinformation, and the difficulty of navigating regulatory environments have added to the complexities facing the industry. Additionally, keeping pace with technological advancements, ensuring cybersecurity, engaging audiences with personalized and interactive content, and addressing globalization issues all require significant innovation and investment to maintain content quality and relevance. In particular, a surge in digital content has saturated the media market, making it increasingly difficult to capture and retain audience attention. Furthermore, a decline in referral traffic—primarily from social media platforms and search engines—has put significant pressure on traditional media outlets. An industry survey from a sample of more than 300 digital leaders from more than 50 countries and territories shows that traffic to news sites from Facebook fell 48% in 2023, with traffic from X/Twitter declining by 27%. As a result, publishers are seeking ways to stabilize their user bases and to enhance engagement sustainably, with 77% looking to invest more in direct channels to deal with the loss of referrals. Enter artificial intelligence: generative AI-powered personalization has become a critical tool for driving the future of media channels. The approach we discuss here offers a roadmap for publishers navigating the shifting dynamics of news consumption and user engagement. Indeed, using AI for backend news automation ( 56% ) is considered the most important use of the technology by publishers. In this post, we’ll walk you through using MongoDB Atlas and Atlas Vector Search to transform how content is delivered to users. The shift in news consumption Today's audiences rarely rely on a single news source. Instead, they use multiple platforms to stay informed, a trend that's been driven by the rise of social media, video-based news formats, and skepticism towards traditional media due to the prevalence (or fear) of "fake news." This diversification in news sources presents a dilemma for publishers, who have come to depend on traffic from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. However, both platforms have started to deprioritize news content in favor of posts from individual creators and non-news content, leading to a sharp decline in media referrals. The key to retaining audiences lies in making content personalized and engaging. AI-powered personalization and recommendation systems are essential tools for achieving this. Content suggestions and personalization By drawing on user data, behavior analytics, and the multi-dimensional vectorization of media content, MongoDB Atlas and Atlas Vector Search can be applied to multiple AI use cases to revolutionize media channels and improve end-user experiences. By doing so, media organizations can suggest content that aligns more closely with individual preferences and past interactions. This not only enhances user engagement but also increases the likelihood of converting free users into paying subscribers. The essence of leveraging Atlas and Vector Search is to understand the user. By analyzing interactions and consumption patterns, the solution not only grasps what content resonates but also predicts what users are likely to engage with in the future. This insight allows for crafting a highly personalized content journey. The below image shows a reference architecture highlighting where MongoDB can be leveraged to achieve AI-powered personalization. To achieve this, you can integrate several advanced capabilities: Content suggestions and personalization: The solution can suggest content that aligns with individual preferences and past interactions. This not only enhances user engagement but also increases the likelihood of converting free users into paying subscribers. By integrating MongoDB's vector search to perform k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) searches , you can streamline and optimize how content is matched. Vectors are embedded directly in MongoDB documents, which has several advantages. For instance: No complexities of a polyglot persistence architecture. No need to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data between different database systems, which simplifies the data architecture and reduces overhead. MongoDB’s built-in scalability and resilience can support vector search operations more reliably. Organizations can scale their operations vertically or horizontally, even choosing to scale search nodes independently from operational database nodes, flexibly adapting to the specific load scenario. Content summarization and reformatting: In an age of information overload, this solution provides concise summaries and adapts content formats based on user preferences and device specifications. This tailored approach addresses the diverse consumption habits of users across different platforms. Keyword extraction: Essential information is drawn from content through advanced keyword extraction, enabling users to grasp key news dimensions quickly and enhancing the searchability of content within the platform. Keywords are fundamental to how content is indexed and found in search engines, and they significantly influence the SEO (search engine optimization) performance of digital content. In traditional publishing workflows, selecting these keywords can be a highly manual and labor-intensive task, requiring content creators to identify and incorporate relevant keywords meticulously. This process is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error, with significant keywords often overlooked or underutilized, which can diminish the content's visibility and engagement. With the help of the underlying LLM, the solution extracts keywords automatically and with high sophistication. Automatic creation of Insights and dossiers: The solution can automatically generate comprehensive insights and dossiers from multiple articles. This feature is particularly valuable for users interested in deep dives into specific topics or events, providing them with a rich, contextual experience. This capability leverages the power of one or more Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate natural language output, enhancing the richness and accessibility of information derived from across multiple source articles. This process is agnostic to the specific LLMs used, providing flexibility and adaptability to integrate with any leading language model that fits the publisher's requirements. Whether the publisher chooses to employ more widely recognized models (like OpenAI's GPT series) or other emerging technologies, our solution seamlessly incorporates these tools to synthesize and summarize vast amounts of data. Here’s a deeper look at how this works: Integration with multiple sources: The system pulls content from a variety of articles and data sources, retrieved with MongoDB Atlas Vector Search. Found items are then compiled into dossiers, which provide users with a detailed and contextual exploration of topics, curated to offer a narrative or analytical perspective that adds value beyond the original content. Customizable output: The output is highly customizable. Publishers can set parameters based on their audience’s preferences or specific project requirements. This includes adjusting the level of detail, the use of technical versus layman terms, and the inclusion of multimedia elements to complement the text. This feature significantly enhances user engagement by delivering highly personalized and context-rich content. It caters to users looking for quick summaries as well as those seeking in-depth analyses, thereby broadening the appeal of the platform and encouraging deeper interaction with the content. By using LLMs to automate these processes, publishers can maintain a high level of productivity and innovation in content creation, ensuring they remain at the cutting edge of media delivery. Future directions As media consumption habits continue to evolve, AI-powered personalization stands out as a vital tool for publishers. By using AI to deliver tailored content and to automate back end processes, publishers can address the decline in traditional referrals and build stronger, more direct relationships with their audiences. If you would like to learn more about AI-Powered Media Personalization, visit the following resources: AI-Powered Personalization to Drive Next-Generation Media Channels AI-Powered Innovation in Telecommunications and Media GitHub Repository : Create a local version of this solution by following the instructions in the repository

June 13, 2024