MongoDB in 2013 -- A Year in Review

It's again that time of the year. Analysts are spending oceans of words to predict the future, companies are making plans for the next year and people are resting and enjoying the break with their families. To me, this is the perfect time to reflect on my choices, the direction I'm headed to and consider if I still love what I do.

At the beginning of the year I decided to join MongoDB (formerly 10gen). The more I think about it, the more I realize I've been wrong. Yes, it's been the worst decision in my life not to join MongoDB when I was first offered the opportunity years ago. At that time an insightful friend asked me to consider the opportunity. At that time I didn't see what I see today.

I didn't see the database world changing so quickly. I didn't see lots of new applications being built on MongoDB and an ecosystem growing around the product. I couldn't glimpse the future of it becoming the leading NoSQL database. I couldn't understand the opportunity for Document Databases and for JSON emerging as a new standard for developers... or maybe I just preferred stability over challenge.

Time has passed since then and now I'm here. How was 2013 at MongoDB? Just amazing. As a good scribe I want to capture the key developments in the MongoDB world in a single page. This is an exercise that I'm doing since years and it gives an idea of the pace of growth, how well we communicate and the level of engagement of the ecosystem.

Company

• MongoDB Extends Its Lead As The Industry's "Best NoSQL Database"
• MongoDB Closes $150 Millions in Funding
• MongoDB is the Fastest-Growing Community in Big Data
• First Ever MongoDB World 2014 Announced
• 10gen Announces Company Name Change to MongoDB, Inc.
• MongoDB Establishes Financial Services Advisory Group
• MongoDB CEO Visits Dublin to Open New EMEA Headquarters
• MongoDB Moves to Former New York Times Building
• 10gen Recognized as a 2013 Computerworld Honors Laureate
• 10gen Hires Former TIBCO CFO Sydney Carey
• Philip Carty to Lead Global Sales at 10gen
• 10gen Promotes Max Schireson to CEO

Products

• MongoDB Certification now available for Developers and DBAs
• Private, On-Demand Training for MongoDB Now Available
• Integration of Hadoop and MongoDB, Big Data’s Two Most Popular Technologies, Gets Significant Upgrade
• MongoDB Backup Service Announced
• 10gen Releases MongoDB 2.4

Clients

• Forbes Succeeds with MongoDB
• Trend Micro Aims for 24/7 Uptime With MongoDB
• Seven Bridges Genomics Relies on MongoDB for Next-Generation Sequencing Analysis
• EnerNOC Unlocks Insights for Electrical Grid with MongoDB
• Novawise Chooses MongoDB to Power Flexible Pharmaceutical App
• MongoDB to Power UK Met Office Space Weather Predictions
• Comparethemarket.com Selects MongoDB to Improve User Experience
• MetLife Leapfrogs Insurance Industry with MongoDB-Powered Big Data Application
• ServiceSource Scales to Manage $8 Billion in Recurring Revenue with MongoDB
• CARFAX® Selects MongoDB to Power 11 Billion Record Database

Partners

• Pentaho Announces New Offering for MongoDB-based Business Intelligence
• MongoDB and Red Hat Deliver Integrated Security Solution for MongoDB
• IBM and MongoDB Collaborate to Bring Mobile to the Enterprise
• Informatica and MongoDB Partner to Expand Data Integration for MongoDB
• 10gen Launches Partner Program

I want to say thank you to all partners, customers, colleagues and users who made this journey a great one. I'm looking forward to working with all of you even more in the years to come. PKPFZ79ENW4D

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010

Gartner has released a few days ago the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010 list. Here you can see the wordle cloud:

While I don't want to spend time talking about  the usual suspects (Cloud, Green, Mobile and Virtualization) I wish to share my thoughts on two topics: Advanced Analytics and Reshaping the Data Center.

Advanced Analytics  
I'm not surprised that a branch of Business Intelligence is still in the list after years of top priority amongst CIOs. Business Intelligence is one of the fields that I love and it's promise is to transform in gold everything it touches, like King Midas. Why is this still on the list? Has something changed in these years?
There are good news. Open Source Software is changing the competitive landscape allowing CIOs, BI Managers and End Users to gather deep insight into business data at a fraction of the cost. I'd like to mention some of the most interesting technologies in the Open Source ecosystem:

• MySQL - This is my favourite! ;) 
• Infobright - A leading columnar storage engine for MySQL;
• Pentaho - End to End Business Intelligence Suite;
• Jaspersoft - Open Source Business Intelligence Suite;
• Talend - Open Source ETL/Data Integration Suite;

This list is partial, but it witness the vitality of Open Source into this particular field. And with this I'll move to the next topic.

Reshaping the Data Center

Gartners is clearly saying: "Dear CIOs, IT Architects and CTOs: your datacenter has been designed twenty years ago... it's time to change."
As MySQL we've promoted a scale-out approach and reading through the lines of Gartner's research it seems that this has proved to be a sound strategy to reduce costs in time of economical crisis.

In conclusion I think that nowadays we cannot avoid to include an Open Source strategy in our plans for the future, whilst not excluding a mix of all the emerging technologies, like Cloud and Virtualization.

Regards,
Luca

Supporting Bioinformatics with Open Source

Yesterday we realeased the press release titled "Italy's CASPUR Relies on MySQL Enterprise to Support its Scientific Research" and I want to spend a few lines in commenting it.

First of all it was a pleasant surprise for me how extensively MySQL in particular and Open Source Software in general is pervasive into scientific research. I particularly appreciated a quote from Caspur:

CASPUR selected MySQL™ because it is a top database choice for the Bioinformatics industry, preferred by both application developers and the computational biology research community, thanks to its simplicity and high-performance.

One of the reasons why they have chosen MySQL answers a common question asked by our user base. The reason is high-performance, and the concern is about MySQL scalability.

We usually address these topics by talking about our huge customer base in the Web, citing Google, Facebook or Yahoo! is usually a good proof that MySQL can scale if the right architecture is chooses. We also highlight the fact that MySQL Cluster is powering the world most demanding telecommunication application and this is convincing as well.

CASPUR is using MySQL on a 2048 core cluster system for High Performance Computing (HPC) and it is a completely different story; it's all about science. It's all about analyzing huge amounts of data for the advantage of the human being. MySQL and Open Source Software are helping humanity; we are honored to have such customers.

Luca

MySQL is Emerging in the Emerging Markets

A survey of more than 400 developers showed that MySQL is closing the lead Microsoft's SQL server has in emerging markets. More than 50 percent of developers in the emerging market countries said they are using Microsoft's SQL Server, but 46 percent said they are using MySQL.

This is another great news, after the results coming from the european SMBs survey. The adoption and usage of MySQL is still growing despite the economic downturn. Go MySQL!

MySQL, Open Source, SMBs and my Home Country

I know that you may have read about it before, but I want to summarize some interesting evolutions of MySQL and the Open Source adoption in Europe.
I will reflect on it with a specific focus on Italy, for two reasons: Italy is my home country and is of the territories where I work as a Sales Engineer (together with Iberia and Emerging Markets).

MySQL has just released survey of 637 small and medium-size businesses (less than 500 employees) in Europe documenting open source usage. According to the survey the future will be full of satisfaction for MySQL.

You can read the comments in Zack's post here. I just want to highlight a few notable facts in the survey:

• More that 50% of interviewed companies are using open source software and Italy is in the top 3, behind Germany and France;
• When asked if they intend to increase the usage of MySQL, this time Italian companies are at the top, planning to expand the adoption by 64%;
• In two years only 15% of Italian SMBs will not use have any open source product in their infrastructure;
• 57% of Italian users are taking advantage of open source for critical projects;
• Top reasons for adopting MySQL are: cost savings, performance and scalability and ease of use;

I always considered my country as part of the late majority in the technology adoption lifecycle, but this time I'm very proud that we are amongst the top open source adopters. Another interpretation of this phenomenon is that open source is really main stream now and thus we are not as ingenious as I may think, but this is another story. :-)

If you want to stay updated on what I'm doing, feel free to follow me on twitter or get in touch via LinkedIn. According to the survey, the MySQL team will work a lot in the next months!