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

From Oracle to 10gen, The MongoDB Company

Those who are familiar with me know I've a dream.

5 years ago I decided to leave a systems integrator where I was doing great. Why? I wanted to be in a company with the same growth prospects that Oracle had in the 80s. I dreamed to be in the Oracle of 30 years ago and, as time travel wasn't affordable, I decided to join MySQL AB to help expand the business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
A few years later my dream came true, but in a slightly different sense. Sun acquired MySQL and was later swallowed by Oracle giving me the opportunity to join the company I wished I could have helped build.

Oracle is an amazing company and the MySQL family is full of energy and passion. The product is much better now and the opportunities are even more. MySQL is a dream that I've proudly been part of, but I decided to move on to a new adventure to keep the energy, commitment and passion that are part of me. That's why I decided to leave Oracle.

I've joined an outstanding company, with a leading solution and huge growth prospects. A company that could become the size of Oracle in less than 30 years. I'll be working with a product sitting at the intersection of Cloud, Mobile and Big Data. A document database that will shape the technology landscape in the years to come.

With an attractive partner program and a shiny new version of MongoDB just launched, it's the right time for me to join 10gen. I've accepted the exciting challenge of building the ecosystem and work with software, hardware, cloud, services and channel partners to make MongoDB the de-facto standard NoSQL database.

Interested in a partnership with 10gen? Let's talk! Reach out to me via LinkedIn or firstname.lastname at 10gen.com. ;)

My new dream starts today, and today is the time to say Thank You! to all friends, colleagues, customers and users who made the MySQL journey a great one. I look forward to working with all of you again in the future.

All the best!

MySQL Enterprise Monitor, my super powers and my life

Last week I had an enlightening experience. It may sound strange, but I found I have super powers... let me explain.

I had a meeting with a big customer of mine to show the value of MySQL Enterprise and Cluster CGE and to share with them the latest and greatest features available in our commercial offerings. During the discussion I said: "Imagine if your MySQL database has a problem at 3pm. Thanks to My Oracle Support and MySQL Enterprise Monitor you can quickly resolve your issues and restore the service".

MySQL Enterprise Monitor

Well, this is exactly what happened at 2.50pm... I missed the prophecy by just 10m and found I have super powers!

You could imagine how happy the customer was about my incredible abilities ;)
However, thanks to MySQL Enterprise Monitor, I'm still alive and I'm here to tell the story.

By using correlated graphs we've been able to filter all the events running at that time and quickly diagnose the problem. For those of you who're curious, they had an issue on their advertising network and, at that particular time, all the banners pointed to the portal bringing the number of active MySQL connections to 8000+ and putting a lot of pressure on the database. In the troubleshooting process we also found some regular spikes in the charts, probably related to batches they weren't aware of and they started an internal discussion to find the cause.

At the end I've learned a few things:

• MySQL Enterprise Monitor is an amazing troubleshooting tool and could also be used to start a conversation between DBAs and DEVs
• Never mention, during a customer visit, that the database might have a problem... or this could really happen
• I've a debt of gratitude with the my colleagues in the MySQL Enterprise team at Oracle. Guys, the next time we meet, drinks are on me ;)

That's it... thanks for taking the time to read this life-changing story ;)

MySQL Events that I don't want to miss

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!

MySQL Cluster 7.2 -- Unlimited Possibilities

We've recently seen some great announcements of MySQL Cluster delivering amazing results for both selects and updates. The posts (see related articles below) are full of juicy technical details and proofs, but today I'd like to change the perspective a bit. Let's compare those figures with real-world data and imagine what could be done. Please note that I'm not using any scientific method here, just dreaming about the unlimited opportunities offered by MySQL Cluster today.

MySQL Cluster 7.2.7 -- 1B+ Writes per Minute

Cluster can deliver 1B+ selects per minute with 8 nodes and 1B+ updates per minute with 30 nodes.

Our planet is getting quite populated and interconnected. World population is 7B+ and 2B+ of us are using internet. Let's assume that, due to time-zones, only 1/3 of the total internet population is online at a given time (700M+) and that a single action generates one update and one select on the database.

What kind of services can we offer then?

With such scalability and performance, MySQL Cluster offers endless opportunities to develop something new that can support the exponential growth of the web and offer always-on services to everyone, for example:

• Hellos from the world -- a website where everyone can say hello to the world, whenever they want. MySQL Cluster can handle the entire online population in less than 1 minute;
• Let's shop together -- a global eCommerce website selling everything with 100% market share. If everyone would buy an item per minute, MySQL Cluster could easily fulfill the needs of the entire internet population with 30 nodes;
• Like everything you like -- a like button that can be attached to everything in order to collect statistics on users' favorite things. MySQL Cluster could easily sustain the total online world assuming they'd like 1 thing per minute;

Furthermore, MySQL Cluster could handle updates from all of Zynga's 60M active daily users in 3 seconds or all of Facebook's 900M+ active users in less than a minute. All of that giving you ACID compliance and synchronous replication to ensure no data loss.

The Oracle MySQL engineering team did a great job with Cluster: let's build the next big thing with it!

Related articles

• Where would I use MySQL Cluster?
• MySQL Cluster 7.2.7 achieves 1BN update transactions per minute
• 1 Billion Queries Per Minute - MySQL Cluster 7.2 is GA!
• Challenges in reaching 1BN reads and updates per minute for MySQL Cluster 7.2

Changing Name and Improving Focus

You might have noticed that this blog changed name and URL. Instead of having one single blog for everything, I decided to split my blogging activities in two separate blogs.

If you're interested in MySQL, Oracle, Databases, Business Intelligence, Open Source, Cloud, etc. this is the place to be. Blog's new name is Data & Co.
A big "Thank you!" to David Stokes who moved all the planet.mysql.com references to the old blog to this new one.

On the other hand, if you'd like to read about communication, marketing, advertising, PR, soft skills, etc. feel free look at Publicime.  Please see the introduction of my new blog here. I've moved non-technical articles to this one to make sure my posts on Data & Co are exclusively technology-centric.

This will result in better focus for both blogs and I won't annoy you with topics you're not interested in. The old url is redirecting to Data & Co. by default.

2011, A great year for MySQL in review...

I see so many posts on what happened to company X, product Y and dream Z that I couldn't resist the temptation to summarize this great year for MySQL. At the end of 2010, Oracle did an announcement we were all waiting for: MySQL 5.5 is GA! Another year has passed since then and it's time to reflect on what has been done.

I know this is a long post. I tried to rewrite it at least 10 times to make it shorter, but I couldn't condense the list. Hence, I wrote a summary in the beginning for those who don't want to read it all.

I believe that 2011 was an exceptional year for MySQL and I really enjoy being part of this team. I wish all of us a lot of success and fun in the years to come!

Summary:
Oracle released many MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.2 DMRs accompanied by new versions of MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Backup, MySQL Workbench (and utilities), MySQL Proxy, MySQL Cluster Manager and Connectors.

The MySQL team unveiled new products like the MySQL Installer for Windows and Oracle VM Templates for MySQL. Besides, the MySQL Enterprise offering has been enriched with new commercial extensions. MySQL can now be leveraged as one of the Oracle data management solutions with new certifications and the integration with My Oracle Support increased the business value of customers' investment on Oracle technologies.

Additionally MySQL presented at major events across the world and won a few awards.

The Oracle's MySQL Sales Consulting Team is Hiring Across EMEA

Would you like to work with the biggest websites and social networks in the world? Do you want to support large enterprises with their database initiatives? Would you like to assist ISVs and OEMs providing the technology that powers their products?

In the MySQL Sales Consulting organization we do just that.

You’ll support MySQL partners, customers and prospects across EMEA, evangelize our products, assist marketing and cooperate with product management to shape the future of MySQL.

Sounds interesting? We're actively looking for senior professionals to join the team!
Feel free to reach me on LinkedIn for more information or have a look at the links below:

• Germany
• Spain
• Austria
• Switzerland

Please note that the location in some posts is wrong as Malaga is obviously neither in Austria nor in Switzerland. :)
Multiple locations for each position are possible and we'll fix the error soon.

Update: we've fixed the location typos now!

MySQL Webinars in the upcoming weeks...

After the slow down due to vacation and warm weather we are ready for a series of educative Italian webinars on MySQL. Here is the list:

Semptember 10@10am CET - "Top 5 Tuning tips for MySQL"
Are your applications slow during peak times? Is the database running slowly? Do you find difficult to pinpoint performance problems? Then this webinar is for you!I will cover the top 5 tips to speed up your MySQL databases from a developer as well as DBA point of view.

October 8@10am CET - "Introduction to MySQL for Windows"
Do you know that MySQL is used extensively on Windows? Would you like to learn the tools that we provide?
Join this webinar! We will discuss the advantages of using MySQL on the Windows Platform.

There will be one more in September... but it will be revealed in the next days. Stay tuned!
Luca