How MongoDB makes me a better technologist

In one of my earlier posts I explained Why we went with MongoDB.  In that post I touched on some of the ways that MongoDB has made things easier from an Operations perspective for me.

In this post I want to expand on that and also talk how using MongoDB has helped me become a better technologist overall.

1. MongoDB makes operations easier, so you can focus on being better operationally.  With Ops Manager, operations such as backups, upgrades, deployments are all automated, this lets me focus on stuff beyond the basics.  Not having to worry about the basics has allowed me to spend time on automating even more, like automated restore scenarios to test out our backups, automating user provisioning and doing performance testing and other stress tests.  So, in essence, MongoDB’s use of automation helps put me in the automation mindset and allows me to automate more of my existing operations.
2. Using the right tool for the right job.  As we all know, MongoDB has some use cases that it really shines in, and some that it does not.  Similarly, relational databases have use cases that they really shine in and some where they struggle.  Adding MongoDB to my toolbox really brought home the point to me that it really is about using the right tool for the right job.  We shouldn’t try to shoe horn everything in to relational databases, similarly we shouldn’t try to shoe horn a relational data model in to MongoDB, right tools for the right job.
3. MongoDB makes High Availability easy.  With the Replica Set design, high availability is easily attained by MongoDB.  This design helped make it easy to plug MongoDB applications in to our existing applications and have them match (or beat) the HA goals that our legacy relational databases have.  This helps me by making me think of ways that we can make other databases as highly available as our MongoDB databases.
4. MongoDB makes it easier to innovate.  MongoDB can be deployed to containers, the cloud, or your internal data centers in an automated fashion and is very easy to maintain.  This allows developers to quickly iterate between versions of their application and allows the database to be a key component to the application infrastructure without being a liability.  With the many drivers available, a developer can use their language of choice to interact with MongoDB.  Developers aren’t the only ones who can leverage these things to innovate, as a DBA I can use these to create internal applications that leverage MongoDB as the back end DB.  This has allowed me to code a lot more.
5. MongoDB helps me stay agile.  Because of the frequent releases to production, MongoDB forces you to rethink your patching/upgrade strategy if you’re used to relational vendors where the patches come less often.  Fortunately with Ops Manager upgrading is easy, so it’s easy to upgrade to the latest version with no downtime to your application and support developers.

 

Not sure where to start with MongoDB?  Start where I started with the M102 course, introduction to MongoDB for DBA’s!

 

Thanks for reading!