Some may say that NoSQL is another buzz word, but things have changed a lot in the big data ecosystem during the last years. It has been said that 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years [1].

The challenge with the current volume of information is to be able to store and process all this data and extract value from it. The traditional RDBMS solutions have limitations or they are too expensive to scale up. Many companies, including those working in financial services and telecoms are moving towards big data and NoSQL as the technology is maturing. MongoDB is one of the preferred open-source solutions.

I was at the MongoDB days conference in London earlier this month, which played host to some really interesting technical talks about new features such as new geospatial indexes, text search or sharding with hashed indexes. Several talks provided low level details about MongoDB internal structures, replication and sharding strategies. Other talks were focused on the operational tasks of a MongoDB cluster, explaining security practices or backup recipes. With five tracks and 34 talks (all of them very appealing), it was hard to decide which one to attend. Some of the presentations can be found on http://www.10gen.com/presentations/event/1910

Some of the most valuable presentations were those related to real life cases and examples ‘from the trenches’, where companies shared their experiences moving towards a NoSQL solution such as MongoDB. Financial services companies are using MongoDB to collect and aggregate data, where their previous data warehouse solution was falling apart. Marketing companies are moving from an Oracle stack to MongoDB with great results. Telecoms firms such as Telefónica or Nokia are moving from heavy enterprise solutions (such as J2EE) towards dynamic languages and MongoDB, making the development process much easier and faster.

Tracking MongoDB’s evolution in the last few years – with the many features and tools added, bugs fixes, stability and performance boosts – I can safely say it’s becoming a mature technology and this is backed by the quick adoption we’re seeing from many companies. The question is… are you prepared to jump in?

 [1] http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/