We’ve made software developers’ lives much simpler: MongoDB Apac head

BENGALURU: Suvig Sharma, senior director for the Asia Pacific region at database provider MongoDB, said major innovations to the company’s product in recent times have made the life of a developer far simpler.

“Today, for most organisations across industries, their competitive differentiation is closely tied to the quality of applications they build, and how fast they innovate.And that is where our modern application data platform comes in,” he said.
MongoDB, founded in 2007 and led by Indian-American Dev Ittycheria, is among the newest and fastest growing database programs. In its second quarter ended July, revenue rose 44% to $199 million. Revenue from its fully-managed cloud database Atlas rose by 83%.
One of the recent innovations was to marry time series data with the larger enterprise database. Time series data are typically huge streams of data. Like those that come continuously from sensors in a manufacturing facility, or those in delivery trucks used to track their location.
You can't keep storing all that data in the enterprise database – they require a different level of optimisation and compression, and so there are specialised databases for them. These also require a way to properly ingest them, store them, query them, do real time analytics, and then archive them online. The different parts of this lifecycle required different tech stacks.
MongoDB’s latest innovation not only brings this entire lifecycle on a single platform, but it also marries it with the enterprise database. “So, now, a developer does not have to contend with different elements of the tech stack. And they can make it much easier to deliver insights – a business can, for instance, marry the data from sensors on a truck, with the inventory data on the production side, to know how much material is where,” Sharma said.
Other big innovations are around enabling customers to future-proof their applications. Traditionally, any database upgrade meant the customer had to upgrade their application too. “You would need to do a whole platform certification. Then you must take every application and test it against the new upgraded version of the database to see the application does not break, etc. That whole process may take six months,” Sharma said.
This now will become unnecessary with what MongoDB calls Versioned API. It allows you to pin your API (application programming interface) driver to a very specific version of Mongo DB. And then, all future versions of the database will be backward compatible. Which means, you can take advantage of some of the database’s new features without immediately upgrading the application. Versioned API has become particularly important now as database upgrades happen faster.
Future-proofing applications has also been made possible by enabling live resharding. A shard key is what allows you to save data exactly where you want it, across different nodes – such as when you want the data closer to the customer, or you don’t want data to cross the borders of a region. In time, it’s possible that some of these requirements change, or there’s too much data on one node. That may require a resharding process, which traditionally meant planning and effort. But now, it can be done live on real-time data, without worrying about any downtime.
“With Versioned API and live resharding, we have decoupled the database lifecycle from the application lifecycle. Developers can keep developing their application, without worrying about what's happening at the backend on the database,” Sharma said.