The 10gen Blog on MongoDB and NoSQL

MongoDB Case Study: Shutterfly

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:32:59 -0500

Shutterfly, a leading Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service, safeguards more than six billion images for millions of customers. As the only photo sharing site that does not down-sample, compress, or force delete photos, Shutterfly faced massive data growth that pushed the performance limits of its existing Oracle database. After an extensive analysis of open source relational and non-relational alternatives, Shutterfly chose MongoDB as its persistent data store.

Before implementation of MongoDB, Shutterfly stored its more than 20 TB of photo metadata in an Oracle RDBMS, vertically partitioning the data by function. The complex infrastructure became hard to manage after a decade of development and made development of new features difficult to execute quickly or correctly. The situation was further exacerbated by the the high costs associated with licensing and hardware. These challenges compelled the Shutterfly team to look at open source options that would also provide improved performance and a simpler API at a reduced cost.

Shutterfly chose MongoDB as its new storage solution primarily because the data model matched common use cases. The rich JSON-based data structure was easy for the development team to use, reduced time to market for new features, and could be leveraged for many different projects. In addition, Shutterfly saw significant performance improvements with the more natural data model. Finally, the MongoDB solution was cost-efficient, providing an open source solution that would enable them to scale horizontally across commodity hardware.

Shutterfly’s migration to MongoDB resulted in a 900% performance improvement when compared to their previous Oracle implementation. In terms of cost, Shutterfly realized a 500% reduction in moving from Oracle to MongoDB. Overall, MongoDB provided Shutterfly with a high performance solution at a significantly reduced cost.

To learn more, read the full case study, or for more resources, check out Shutterfly’s Kenny Gorman’s presentation at MongoSV 2010 “Sharing Life’s Joy using MongoDB: A Shutterfly Case Study” or the follow-up Q&A with Gorman hosted by NoSQLDatabases.com. More recently, at MongoSF 2011 Gorman presented on “MongoDB Profiling and Tuning.”

Photos from the London MUG Meetup

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:22:00 -0500

10gen CEO and Co-Founder Dwight Merriman visited the London MongoDB User Group on January 31st, presenting Crazy Stuff: hacks, internals, and sneaky tricks.

Upcoming MongoDB Events

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:30:34 -0500

Early this morning, the 10gen team watched as the last tickets to MongoDB Boulder were claimed. Tomorrow, the sellout crowd in Colorado will enjoy presentations from 10gen engineers Kyle Banker, Dan Crosta, Robert Stam, and Ryan Nitz, as well as from guest speakers James Ward, Brian Fromme, Krishnanad Khambadkone, Nathan Wells, David Blado, and Chris Merz. Attendees will also hear from 10gen’s Presiden, Max Schireson.

Following Boulder, the 10gen team has a busy spring ahead. A free meetup on February 6 in Brussels will give the city’s MongoDB fans an opportunity to learn and ask any nagging questions. On February 15th, developers and other industry professionals from across the Lone Star State will meet for MongoDB Austin to hear from engineers at 10gen, X.commerce, and RedHat. Beginning February 28th, the 10gen team will also bring MongoDB to Strata, a conference dedicated to the business and practice of data innovation, hosted in Santa Clara, CA.

Not to be forgotten, our webinar series continues with:

-Monitoring Your MongoDB Deployment (Feb 9)
-MongoDB Schema Design: How to think non-relational (Feb 17)
-MongoDB Schema Design: Principles and Practice (Feb 23rd)
-Building Your First MongoDB Application (Mar 15)

If you’re already using MongoDB in production, tell us about your application, or contact us to learn more about training and other solutions from 10gen.

Learn more about MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS)

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:13:27 -0500

If you’ve already deployed an application using MongoDB, you might have heard about MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS), a free and publicly available SaaS solution for monitoring your MongoDB deployment. On Thursday, February 9, 10gen’s Jared Rosoff will host a free webinar, Monitoring Your MongoDB Deployment. The webinar includes an MMS demo and will give MongoDB users the chance to ask questions about deploying and maintaining applications based on the NoSQL database.

MMS is a secure system which collects usage statistics and allows users to proactively monitor a MongoDB cluster via a simple Python agent. The data collected is sent securely to the centralized MMS servers for storage and presentation; at-a-glance charts and automated alerts make it easy to keep your application running smoothly.

MMS is custom-built, which means it takes into consideration the unique requirements of MongoDB. Unlike most off-the-shelf monitoring systems, which are built for generic systems management, MMS embodies the best practices for MongoDB by incorporating wisdom from 10gen engineers who have worked with hundreds of production deployments. Performance, resource utilization, availability, and response times are all tracked on the custom MMS interface.

If you’ve already purchased a support package from 10gen, MMS allows our team of engineers to provide superior customer support by proactively monitoring the health of your deployment. In some cases, 10gen engineers identify potential issues before they pose a serious threat. We understand the sensitive nature of MMS data and have extensive data access controls and audits in place.

Setup and configuration of MMS is simple—within minutes of installation, your devops and systems administration team can manage and optimize your MongoDB deployment, and derive valuable insights from key operational metrics. Just create an account at mms.10gen.com, then download and install the agent on your MongoDB cluster. Within a few minutes, your data will be visible on the web-based platform.

Learn more about MMS today or get started with MMS now.

Free Webinar: Diagnostics and Performance Tuning

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:41:38 -0500

We’re pleased to invite you to attend another free webinar, “Diagnostics and Performance Tuning.” The third in our webinar series for the year, this session will focus on tips and tricks to help keep your MongoDB deployment running smoothly, even as it scales up.

In this presentation, Kyle Banker will teach you how to read the omens to ensure that your MongoDB deployment is in optimal shape by providing a deeper understanding of memory usage, file sizes, flushing, journaling, among others. You’ll walk away from this presentation with ten concrete steps to take to prevent performance degradation before it occurs.

Presenter Kyle Banker, author of MongoDB in Action , works for 10Gen maintaining the MongoDB Ruby and C Drivers and supporting their respective developer communities.

You can also check out Kyle’s past presentations on the 10gen website, or sign up for MongoDB events announcements and other updates, and you could win one of 3 free copies of MongoDB in Action.

Recap: MongoDB Tokyo 2012

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:33:42 -0500

On January 18, MongoDB Tokyo took place at the Shinagawa Seaside Rakuten Tower, as nearly 200 guests, double the attendance of the 2011 event, arrived to see presentations on MongoDB from both 10gen engineers and Japanese users.

NEW: Follow @mongodb_jp, the new Twitter handle for the Japanese MongoDB community.

Representing 10gen, President Max Schireson and Senior Engineer Alvin Richards kicked off the event with a keynote speech and presentations on schema design and deployment architecture. External speakers included representatives from NHN, Cyberagent, Nifty, and Rakuten. Following the presentations, refreshments were provided by sponsor KK Ashisuto.

Presentation slideshows now available online include:

KVSの性能、RDBMSのインデックス、更にMapReduceを併せ持つAll-in-One NoSQL: MongoDB (Hiroaki Kubota)

事例：とある写真共有アプリでの MongoDB (Tetsuya Ohira)

mongo-hadoopで始める大規模ログ解析〜低コストへの新たな道〜 (Daichi Morifuji)

ソーシャルゲームにおけるMongoDB適用事例 *(Masakazu Matsushita)

Special thanks from the 10gen team go out to Takahiro Inoue, who has helped to grow the MongoDB User Group in Japan to a staggering 600 members.

*slides also available in English

Recap: NYC MongoDB User Group Meetup

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:35:00 -0500

Earlier this week, the NYC MongoDB User Group met at Buddy Media to learn more about how three different companies were using MongoDB.

Trello, an online organization and collaboration app, uses MongoDB alongside Node.js, Redis, and Backbone to run highly-responsive single-page applications, allowing multiple users to share information almost instantly on virtual project boards.

You can view the Trello presentation and slides online

Michael Lysaght and Oleksii Iepishkin, of SecondMarket, presented their open source tool Mongeez, a tool that helps to deploy data changes in MongoDB automatically without losing consistency with the existing codebase. (Mongeez is available on Github). SecondMarket helps to connect investors with alternative investment opportunities in over forty asset classes.

Last but certainly not least, Erik Lubow and Russell Bradberry presented SimpleReach, a realtime analytics tool which uses recommendations to suggest content to online readers. SimpleReach uses Node.js and MongoDB schema design to enable dynamic collection creation and realtime data delivery.

Photos from the meetup are available on the MongoDB Flickr page, and video footage from all three presentations can be found online.

Not in NYC? Check out other MUGs around the world, and sign up for our newsletter to hear more about MongoDB events in your area.

Reminder: Early Bird pricing for MongoDB Austin ends today!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:34:00 -0500

Just a short reminder from the 10gen team:

Early Bird ticket sales for MongoDB Austin will be closing on January 18. Today is your last chance to take advantage of a 50% discount on admission

At MongoDB Austin you’ll have the chance to hear from the team at 10gen working on MongoDB. Presentations from 10gen engineers will cover topics including application development, deployment, and the newest features in MongoDB.

MongoDB Austin will also highlight several use cases from the MongoDB community. Some key sessions to look forward to:

-Journaling and the Storage Engine (Scott Hernandez, 10gen)
-Mobilize Your MongoDB! Developing iPhone and Android Apps in the Cloud (Grant Shipley, RedHat)
-Diagnostics and Performance Tuning (Brandon Diamond, 10gen)
-Replication and Replica Sets (Mike O’Brien, 10gen)

We have a great lineup of speakers for the event and hope that you will be able to join us. Remember to purchase your tickets by January 19th to lock in your 50% Early Bird discount.

Free Webinar: MongoDB and Amazon Web Services

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:39:00 -0500

Join us on Friday, January 20th for a free webinar on MongoDB and Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services provides reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud and is a great match for MongoDB. Sandeep Parikh will review the specific steps necessary to build and deploy MongoDB on AWS, addressing topics including:

- How MongoDB’s components map to AWS compute instances and storage
- Reference designs for deploying production MongoDB clusters
- Backing up and restoring data

Presenter Sandeep Parikh has a background in software engineering and has developed systems for social network analysis, natural language sentiment and text similarity. Before joining 10gen, Sandeep wrote code for Ravel where he developed a large scale graph processing framework on top of Hadoop.

To learn more about the webinar and register, visit the event page or check out what other events are happening around the world. You can also download a free copy of the MongoDB on AWS white paper on our website.

MongoDB Case Study: Craigslist

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:48:27 -0500

Craigslist is a popular classifieds and job posting community which serves 570 cities in 50 countries. With 1.5 million new classified ads posted every day, Craigslist must archive billions of records in many different formats, and must be able to query and report on these archives at runtime. Historically, Craigslist stored its information in a MySQL cluster but the lack of flexibility and management costs became barriers for continued use. In 2011, Craigslist migrated over two billion documents to MongoDB for its scalability and flexible schema.

For much of the history of Craigslist, MySQL was the only option for data storage, including the archive. The original Craigslist archive application took the existing live database data and copied it to the archive system. But using a relational database system limited flexibility and caused lengthy delays because changes to the live database schema needed to be propagated to the archive system. When making changes to billions of rows in their MySQL cluster, Craigslist could not move data to the archive. Archive-ready data would pile up in the production database; performance on the live database deteriorated.

To prevent further impediments to the company’s growth and ability to serve its customers, the team began looking for alternative explanations. After evaluating several NoSQL options, Craigslist settled upon MongoDB. One compelling reason is that MongoDB boasts built-in scalability. Each post and its metadata can be stored as a single document. As the schema changes on the live database, MongoDB can accommodate these changes without costly schema migrations.

In addition, MongoDB’s support for auto-sharding and high availability eased operational pain points for Craigslist. MongoDB enabled Craiglist to scale horizontally across commodity hardware without having to write and maintain complex, custom sharding code. Using auto-sharding, Craigslist’s initial MongoDB deployment was designed to hold over 5 billion documents and 10TB of data.

MongoDB concepts and features are similar, in many respects, to relational databases so Craigslist’s developers found the transition seamless. Lead developer Jeremy Zawodny, the author of High Performance MySQL, describes the transition: “Coming from a relational background, specifically a MySQL background, a lot of the concepts carry over…. It makes it very easy to get started.”

To learn more, please visit the Craigslist case study on 10gen.com

MongoDB Case Study: foursquare

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:56:00 -0500

Foursquare is a location-based social network which has grown rapidly since its inception in 2009, requiring efficient ways to scale with limited engineering resources. As its user profile and activity stream data increased, foursquare made the strategic decision to migrate storage of venues and check-ins to MongoDB as a long-term scalable solution to the company’s continued expansion.

Originally, the foursquare application relied on a single relational database. As the company experienced rapid growth, they split the data to two nodes: one for check-ins (the biggest data set) and one for everything else. However, it was clear that in time, check-ins alone would increase beyond what a single machine could handle. MongoDB not only solved the initial problem, but also provided the tools for agile development.

Foursquare can now take advantage of MongoDB’s built-in auto-sharding. MongoDB’s auto-sharding partitions the database, allowing foursquare to scale writes and spin up new nodes as their application grows. Instead of writing its own sharding layer, foursquare can rely on MongoDB’s automated scaling infrastructure, enabling engineers to focus on building their application.

MongoDB has allowed foursquare it to dramatically simplify its data model. For instance, rather than storing tags (“has wifi”, “great for dates”, “hotspot”, etc) in a separate table, in MongoDB tags are embedded directly into the document representing a venue. This is both more efficient at run-time and easier for engineers to understand and manipulate.

As Harry Heymann, Lead Server Engineer at foursquare, explained, “MongoDB is a practical database for practical problems that engineers in the real world have…it’s only going to continue to evolve into a database that just makes our jobs easier as application developers, which is fantastic.” To learn more, visit the case study or hear directly from Heymann about how MongoDB has made a difference at foursquare.

The Big Picture for Big Data

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:15:00 -0500

A guest post from GigaOM

Are you sitting on un-mined gold? As the volume of enterprise data created has moved past terabytes to petabytes, companies need to determine the best way for them to store, manage and analyze all that information.

GigaOM’s Structure:Data, now a two-day conference, will assemble the world’s leading technologists, practitioners and business leaders to offer solutions to the questions posed by the growth of big data, including storage needs, data analysis and the uncovering of new business opportunities. The conference will include presentations from 10gen CEO and Co-Founder Dwight Merriman, as well as from Wordnik’s VP of Engineering, Tony Tam. Wordnik was one of the earliest adopters of MongoDB, using the open source non-relational database to store billions of records.

Structure:Data will feature additional presentations spanning four general themes—Infrastructure, Algorithms, Startups, and Putting Data to Work. The world’s leading technologists, practitioners and business leaders will answer the questions posed by the growth of big data, including:
-What can we do with data and who should manage it?
-Which companies are generating the most big data and what can we learn from them?
-What are the technologies and companies to watch over the next 18 months?
-What must CIOs plan for?
-What are the best solutions and approaches for your company?

Join us in New York on March 21 and 22, 2012. Friends of MongoDB save $100 when you register today.

MongoDB at SCALE 10x

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:17:00 -0500

The MongoDB team is thrilled to be part of SCALE’s 10-year anniversary conference in Los Angeles this year. Southern California Linux Expo has grown to a three-day mega-conference, attracting thousands of open source enthusiasts from around the world.

Meghan Gill, who supports community development and outreach for MongoDB, will present The Care and Feeding of an Open Source Community, discussing the developer-based outreach strategy that helped MongoDB to become a well-known project in the open source world. First made available in 2009, downloads of the document-oriented database software now exceed 100,000 each month. You can meet Meghan and other members of the 10gen team at the MongoDB booth during SCALE.

Because the MongoDB community has grown tremendously in Los Angeles, we’re also hosting a full-day MongoDB conference on January 19, timed so that SCALE attendees from out of town can stop in to learn more about the document-oriented open source database. MongoDB Los Angeles will be the first full-day MongoDB conference in Southern California. Presentations include:

-Building Your First MongoDB Application (Antoin Girbal, 10gen)
-Using Spring and MongoDB with CloudFoundry (Josh Long, VMWare)
-Indexing and Query Optimizer (Kevin Hanson, 10gen)
-N2M: node.js and MongoDB as the modern stack for the real-time web (Jason Hoffman, Joyent)

The LA MongoDB User Group meetup will be held on the evening of January 18th, featuring a presentation from 10gen.

We’re excited that the event will be co-located with SCALE, one of the premier events in the open source world. Don’t forget to register for MongoDB Los Angeles!

Reminder: Get your Early Bird tickets to MongoDB Boulder

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:20:54 -0500

Just a short reminder from the 10gen team: Wednesday, January 4th is your last chance to take advantage of early bird pricing for MongoDB Boulder on February 1.

At MongoDB Boulder you’ll have the chance to hear from the team at 10gen working on MongoDB. Presentations from 10gen engineers will cover topics including application development, deployment, and the newest features in MongoDB.

MongoDB Boulder will also highlight several use cases from the regional MongoDB community. Some key sessions to look forward to:

-Journaling and the Storage Engine (Kyle Banker, 10gen)
-Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps on the Cloud (James Ward, Heroku)
-Running MongoDB in the Cloud (Dan Crosta, 10gen)
-Exporting, Reporting, and Visualizing: get more from your data in MongoDB (James Dixon, Pentaho)
-Eating our own Dogfood: Building a Scalable MongoDB Monitoring Service (Ryan Nitz, 10gen)

We have a great lineup of speakers for the event and hope that you will be able to join us. Remember to purchase your tickets by January 4th to lock in your 50% Early Bird discount.

Free Webinar: Hybrid Applications using MongoDB and an RDBMS

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:30:00 -0500

It is common to use multiple systems as part of the infrastructure of an application, but it’s sometimes unclear to developers when to use MongoDB alongside a relational database and what the best practices are. To help developers and administrators better navigate this decision, 10gen’s Chief Evangelist, Steve Francia, will be leading a free webinar on hybrid applications with MongoDB and an RDBMS on January 6, 2012. The webinar agenda includes:

-Intro to MongoDB
-Why Hybrid
-Hybrid Case Studies
-How OpenSky implemented Hybrid MySQL / MongoDB

Steve is the ideal person to lead this session thanks to real-world experience using an RDBMS alongside a document-based database like MongoDB. During his time at OpenSky, Steve led a team that built the first e-commerce site to use both MongoDB and MySQL (it was also one of the first MongoDB-backed sites). By making a few smart choices about which data was stored in each database, the team at OpenSky was able to spend less time worrying about scaling and replica sets and more time focusing on a clean, functional finished product. Steve joined 10gen in August after serving as VP of Engineering at OpenSky.

Learn more about the webinar, and check out other upcoming MongoDB events around the world.

MongoDB Case Study: Wordnik

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:06:00 -0500

At six times the size of the Oxford English Dictionary, Wordnik helps bring words to life by showing the conversations happening around them. Because Wordnik relies on data from real-time web posts, they needed a reliable and performance-tested database solution.

In 2009, Wordnik engineers realized that their existing MySQL data store couldn’t keep pace with the user-generated content which constantly expanded the site’s dictionary. The engineers created a prototype to test MongoDB, migrating five billion records to the non-relational database in a single day. Over the course of the next month, the entire database was migrated to MongoDB under the watchful eyes of a single developer.

MongoDB now handles every site request sent to Wordnik—often over 20 million API calls per day, from millions of unique users each month. Under their previous MySQL system, Wordnik’s IT engineers frequently dealt with locked tables and outages when too much data was added at once; using MongoDB as a non-relational database solution has eliminated the problem, and the system handles bursts of as many as 50,000 words per second during busy periods without breaking a sweat.

For Wordnik’s engineers, life with MongoDB has meant faster data retrieval and 75% less code. To read more about how Wordnik has deployed MongoDB (and how it changed day-to-day life for developers), visit the full-length case study, or check out Wordnik VP of Engineering Tony Tam’s presentation at MongoSV 2011.

Reminder: Get your Early Bird tickets for Mongo Los Angeles

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:49:00 -0500

Just a short reminder from the 10gen team: Thursday is your last chance to take advantage of early bird pricing for Mongo Los Angeles on Thursday, January 19th.

At Mongo Los Angeles you will have an opportunity to hear directly from the team at 10gen working on MongoDB. Presentations from 10gen engineers will cover topics including application development, deployment, and the newest features in MongoDB.

Mongo Los Angeles will also highlight several use cases from the Los Angeles MongoDB community. Some key sessions to look forward to:
-Schema Design with MongoDB (Kevin Hansen, 10gen)
-Best of both worlds: Building the bridge between RDBMS and MongoDB (Will Jang, NBC Universal Group)
-How and When to Scale MongoDB with Sharding (Antoine Girbal, 10gen)
-MongoDB: Scaling Citygrid’s Places Platform (Prashanth Ramdas, CityGrid Media)
-MongoDB’s New Aggregation Framework (Paul Pederson, 10gen)
-MongoDB and Analytics: Turning JSON data to Information (Roger Bodamer)

We have a great lineup of speakers for the event and hope that you will be able to join us. Buy your ticket by Thursday and you’ll save 50% off the regular ticket price.

(The LA MongoDB User Group meetup at MediaTemple in Santa Monica earlier this month)

Looking to Scale MongoDB on the Cloud? Try a PaaS

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:00:00 -0500

A guest post from Isaac Roth of Red Hat OpenShift

Two weeks ago a few members from the OpenShift team made it down to Santa Clara to hang out at MongoSV (Silicon Valley), take in a few sessions and have some great conversations with other MongoDB enthusiasts. If you didn’t make it out to the conference, you really missed out. There were some great sessions that covered MongoDB scaling strategies, schema design, performance tuning, internals and even a preview of MongoDB 2.2.

As you know, there’s a vibrant ecosystem of partners around MongoDB with everything from hosted MongoDB to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers that offer managed MongoDB. I was fortunate to meet the developers of several interesting open source projects that add on to MongoDB or use MongoDB internally. I was also able to speak with many developers who use MongoDB in their projects from mobile and enterprise social applications to a control system that leverages real-time sensor data.

Ok, if you didn’t catch the announcement at the show, you might be asking yourself, what’s OpenShift? It’s Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that supports Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python and of course MongoDB. What’s the point of a PaaS? To make a developer’s life easier. How? By automating the tedious and often complex tasks of configuring middleware and scaling applications.

At the conference, we took the opportunity to launch what we feel is the industry’s best support for MongoDB on a PaaS. Our goal is to make MongoDB easy AND powerful for developers who want to take advantage of it in the cloud. You can think of OpenShft as a MongoDB PaaS.

Here’s a recap of what we announced at the conference, plus some new features that just went live today:

MongoDB 2.0 Support

MongoDB 2.0 introduces a bunch of cool features that you can easily test drive in the cloud. How? OpenShift has a simple sign up that requires just an email address. Next, you install the OpenShift client tools or use the web UI, issue one command to add MongoDB to your project and congrats! You are now running MongoDB on the cloud, on a PaaS to be specific.

Big Instances, for FREE!
When you sign up for OpenShift you get up to five, free 512 MB instances on which to deploy your applications and MongoDB. What’s the catch? There is none. Getting started with MongoDB in the cloud is fast, free and easy! If you haven’t used Mongo, this is a great way to start experimenting with it.

Log Tailing in the Cloud
We’ve also added the ability tail MongoDB logs on OpenShift. (You can do this with application log files too.) Just because you’re running on the cloud doesn’t mean you don’t want to audit what is going on at any given time. You get the best of both worlds here: Simplicity and economy by outsourcing the platform, but also visibility and feedback as if MongoDB was running locally.

Snapshots
With a simple command you can backup and restore MongoDB instances running on the OpenShift PaaS. Don’t worry about filesystems and dump commands and whatever - let OpenShift do it for you.

RockMongo Admin GUI
We’ve made it easy to manage MongoDB on OpenShift with the ability to deploy the RockMongo web administration GUI alongside your MongoDB instance with a single command. We’ve got a step-by-step blog and video that walks you through the process.

MongoDB Shell
Again, our aim is to make working MongoDB in the cloud as easy as if you were working with it locally. OpenShift has integrated the MongoDB Shell into its client tools so that you can administer MongoDB from the same prompt you use to administer your. We’ve got a step-by-step blog and video that shows you how to use it.

MongoDB Monitoring Service from 10Gen
With one command, you can add MMS to your OpenShift-hosted MongoDB. This simple but powerful service allows you to keep an eye on your MongoDB and visually check its pulse at any point, displaying a rich set of key performance indicators and much more. As you’d expect, we’ve created a detailed blog and video that shows how to get started with MMS on OpenShift.

If you want to see MongoDB in action on OpenShift, or try it yourself, we’ve got a ton of resources to get you started. Here’s a few:
Deploying Python Apps in the Cloud with MongoDB and OpenShift – blog and video.
Deploying PHP Apps in the Cloud with MongoDB and OpenShift – blog and video.
Getting Started with MongoDB Monitoring Service on OpenShift – blog and video.
Getting Started with MongoDB Shell on OpenShift – blog and video.

Or, you can attend our webinar co-presented with 10Gen today, Dec 20, 2011 at 2 PM EST. You can register here.

To recap, MongoDB is a core data storage platform for the OpenShift PaaS and we’re excited to embrace it. Let us know what you think by blogging or tweeting about your experience. You can also interact with us on Twitter, Facebook, in the forums or on IRC at freenode - #openshift !

Announcing the 2011 MongoDB Community Award Winners

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:25:00 -0500

This year, 10gen established the MongoDB Community Awards, which help us to recognize and reward peer-nominated community members who have helped to make the MongoDB project a success to date. Finalists competed in three categories—Community Champion, Innovative Application, and Core Contributor—to win the grand prize, a trip to SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX this coming March.

Elected by an online peer-voting process, the grand prize winners are:

Community Champion: Nathen Harvey. The Manager of Web Operations for CustomInk.com and the co-organizer of the Washington DC MongoDB Users’ Group and DevOps DC, Nathen was recognized as a true champion of the MongoDB cause. As organizer of the DC MUG, Nathen has been instrumental in growing the group to 250 members in just one year.

Innovative Application: MongoPress by Mark Smalley. The creator of MongoPress earned this year’s Innovative Application Award. MongoPress uses PHP and jQuery to offer a NoSQL alternative which is easy to use (even for beginners) and offers a high-performance and more lightweight alternative to WordPress.

Core Contributor: Guillermo Rauch and Aaron Heckmann. The team behind education startup LearnBoost built their platform on node.js and MongoDB. In the process, they created Mongoose, a popular MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

To learn more about our winners, you can check out Nathen Harvey’s presentation at MongoSV, explore Mongoose code on Github, or download MongoPress.

Presentations and Partner Highlights from MongoSV

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:53:00 -0500

We closed 2011 with the largest MongoDB event of year, MongoSV. The conference brought together more than 1,100 MongoDB enthusiasts in Santa Clara, CA. With seven concurrent tracks, guests had to make tough choices between several compelling presentations in each time slot. Fortunately, all of the presentation videos will be available on 10gen.com over the coming weeks, and many have been posted already.

The 50+ sessions at MongoSV covered MongoDB development and operations fundamentals, new features, community case studies, and partner technologies. Some of the conference highlights included:

MongoDB’s New Aggregation Framework - Chris Westin, 10gen
Deploying MongoDB for High Availability - Eliot Horowitz, 10gen
Experiences Deploying MongoDB on AWS - Cooper Bethea, foursquare
The Importance of Accessibility and Open Source in Developer Adoption - Jason Hoffman, Joyent
A Year with MongoDB: Running Operations to Keep the Game Magic Alive - Curt Stevens, Disney
MongoDB at CustomInk: Adoption, Operations, and Community - Nathen Harvey, CustomInk

Many other presentations have been posted as well, and there are more to come. Keep checking 10gen.com/presentations for updates.

The event wouldn’t have been as successful without the support of so many partners and sponsors, including Microsoft, VMWare Cloud Foundry, Red Hat OpenShift, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, MongoLab, Nebula, Joyent, Pentaho, Fusion-io, Ubuntu, O’Reilly, Manning Publications, Loggly, Github, Twilio, MongoHQ, Server Density, Right Scale, dotCloud, PalominoDB, DATAVERSITY, and Startup Monthly.

At MongoSV, several of our partners made exciting announcements about integration of MongoDB with their products. For example, Red Hat OpenShift is now offering MongoDB version 2.0 on their platform, as well as up to five, free 512 MB instances on which to deploy your applications and MongoDB. Joyent launched its SmartMachine Appliance for MongoDB. Jaspersoft released a new version of the native connector to MongoDB, enabling easier reporting, analytics, and visualization of Big Data. And as you may have read on the 10gen blog yesterday, it is now possible to run MongoDB on Microsoft Windows Azure
MongoSV was also the official launch of Kyle Banker’s new book, MongoDB in Action. Guests were offered a generous discount on hot-off-the-presses copies from Manning, and could get their book signed by the author on site.

Mike Dirolf of fiesta.cc kept an impressive live blog of the event running, while intrepid Twitterers used the hashtag #mongosv over 1,200 time during the course of the event. We also took hundreds of photos, and you can check out the rapidly-growing photo album from the event on Flickr.

Thanks again to all of the community members, presenters, and partners who helped make MongoSV such a success. We look forward to seeing you at our 2012 events.