MongoDB CTO Discusses The Database Evolution

What database trends have you seen develop over the past year or so?

People are moving from traditional databases to databases like MongoDB. That’s a big change. The reason for that is, as data volumes get larger and larger and everyone wants to use their data more and get more value out of their data, the requirements of the database keep going up. In tech, databases were really the last hold out of really hard things to work with.

With MongoDB, databases are becoming an easy thing, so it’s a pretty huge change. All the requirements around being able to add features faster and being able to scale faster, be up all the time and use real time data – nobody wants to look at old data. The expectations from users keep going up.

What do your customers say are their biggest challenges?

There’s so much data and it’s so hard to understand what it is and where it comes from. It’s difficult for them to make sense of what’s going on and, when acting upon data, they want to move quickly and safely.

What impact is IoT having on databases?

MongoDB is very good for this sort of thing. There are really three different reasons why it’s good with IoT.

One is the pure volume – the massive amounts of data. MongoDB can handle massive amounts of data. Secondly, one of the key elements of the most interesting IoT applications is that you don’t have just one data source. You have all different sets of data sources and that’s changing all the time.

Being able to store different types of data in the same structure with flexibility becomes really important. The other thing about IoT information is that there tends to be two main access patterns. One is people wanting to see their data right away.

For example, they want to look at their Nest and interact with it. Then there are times when people want to do very quick aggregations across all of the IoT data, look for patterns etc. One of the things MongoDB is getting better at is being able to mix and match traditional transactional use cases and analytics use cases. For IoT that’s quite important.

What would you say is the most important development at MongoDB right now?

We’ve actually got so much going on at the moment it’s hard to pick one. Atlas is a pretty big deal. Atlas is a huge change for us as far as business concerned and the way people work with us. It’s a product that people have been asking for for a long time.

Then I think the upcoming launch of 3.4 and all of the new features that offers is a pretty big deal too. Which is more important? It’s hard to say but those are the two biggest things happening at MongoDB right now.

Read More about MongoDB 3.4 and the future on page 2…