Nosh Petigara

playa maderas, nicaragua http://instagr.am/p/M6dOqZLn56/

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:32:32 -0400

playa maderas, nicaragua http://instagr.am/p/M6dOqZLn56/

My last day at 10gen

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:37:00 -0400

Friday was my last day with 10gen working on MongoDB.

My first day at 10gen was December 1, 2009. The stable release of MongoDB was v1.0 (v1.2 would be released 9 days later). 10gen was Dwight, Eliot, Mike, Kristina, Mathias and Kyle huddled around a desk in a shared office on the 8th floor of 17 W 18th Street (and Aaron based out of the Bay Area). Sourceforge had started talking about how they were migrating large portions of their site to MongoDB.

10gen and MongoDB have come some ways since then. More than any milestone though, what sticks out for me are the thousands (quite literally!) of interactions I’ve had with MongoDB users over the past 2 years and 7 months. These users were taking a bet on an cutting-edge product. They were energized that databases can be fun to work with. And they were eager to be part a group that is upending traditional notions of what enterprise software can be. The same energy and camaraderie exists today - among a developer community that now numbers probably over a few hundred thousand. That is quite amazing and I’m sure that there are many great days ahead for 10gen.

I’ve written about what it is like to work at 10gen, about community building, and a lot about open source software. Being part of 10gen over the past 3 years has encompassed all of that - and its been unique combination of product + timing + people + company culture + business model. I’m going to miss it. I’ve learned tremendously, though, and I’m excited to apply that to new problems, challenges, and opportunities.

For those of you who only have my old 10gen contact info - I can be reached on email, linkedin, and twitter. If you are cooking up something in the cloud/data/mongodb areas, or just want to say hi, drop me a line!

What's happening in the enterprise storage market?

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 16:01:59 -0400

The enterprise storage market is huge. The the top 5 players in the space (EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP, Hitachi) sell about $20 billion a year of storage systems. Although that revenue isn’t going anywhere quickly, its interesting to look at some recent trends that are sure to impact this segment over time.

Flash everywhere

For many applications, the days of spinning hard drives are numbered. The MacBook Air I’m running on doesn’t have a spinning drive. Neither does your phone. Its all solid state storage. Server hardware is going in that direction as well with various permuations of flash/solid state memory. With falling prices per GB, increasing capacities, and higher reliability- making the case for solid-state storage is increasingly easy choice for applications that demand high throughput I/O or low-latency access to data. But its not just a raw GB cost vs performance argument. Along with the performance gains, solid state storage also gives a huge power consumption and space argument - which at scale makes a huge difference. Wired just published an article about this trend, which is worth a read

In the component market, you have “commodity” SSDs which are showing up increasingly. You then have “high end” solid state component players such as fusion-io and virident. Vendors such as Violin Memory are building out storage arrays, built only on (and optimized for) flash memory. And of course, traditional storage such as EMC are incorporating flash into their disk-based storage arrays and coming out with various flash based products, and acquiring vendors in this area.

The one place where flash adoption has lagged is in large public clouds - most likely because of cost and reliability concerns. That’s changing, however, with Rackspace, HP, and Microsoft Azure have all announced SSD-based storage options in the last few months. And its a good guess that we’ll see solid state options in most clouds over this year.

Bring processing closer to the data

Starting in the 90’s, the trend has been to centralize storage on appliances- and companies such as NetApp and EMC have benefitted greatly from this trend. From an administrative standpoint, this makes it easier to manage, backup, and provide high service levels around data. However, with data volumes growing faster than network capacity, and the necessity more real-time data processing, this trend is undergoing a small (but growing) reversal. Systems such hadoop closely couple compute and storage - as an explicit part of their design. In most cases, this means moving storage back into the server (where the compute lives), rather than try and centralize it in an appliance over the network. Some flash component vendors, such as Fusion-io, are pushing this approach as well - with specialized APIs that allow applications to treat solid-state devices as if it is an extension of RAM

Scale-out architectures & commodity hardware

Most database and file systems that have been designed in the past few years, have moved to a model that eschews using complex, high-end hardware and instead run on (possibly virtualized) commodity servers. HDFS and GlusterFS are examples in the filesystem world, and MongoDB, Cassandra, and Riak are examples of this trend in the database market. Unlike systems like Oracle RAC which require shared storage, most of these systems can work equally well (and sometimes better) on standard server hardware with direct-attached (solid-state or regular) disks. Instead of relying a single high-end server and a single centralized piece of storage hardware, these systems put the ‘smarts’ for things like high-availability into the software layer so that the database or filesystem spread across a large number of servers appears as a single unit to an application. This gives a theoretically infinite amount of scalability, as you can increase storage (and processing) capacity by adding additional servers into the clusters. This model is a very good fit for cloud-like environments where the emphasis is on standardized virtualized machines, rather than specialized hardware.

So what does this all mean? As solid-state storage becomes the default, I think we’ll see a lot more software optimized specifically for this mode of storage. With spinning disks, there is a huge difference between random and sequential I/O (for each random I/O the disks needs to physically spin to the right spot). However, with solid-state storage, this disparity is effectively eliminated. There are other differences as well for e.g. erases take an order of magnitude long than writes on most SSDs. So there is going to be a lot of innovation as software developers adapt to solid-state storage becoming the default. On the hardware side, incorporating more flash-based options into traditional storage appliances will definitely extend the capabilities of appliances. However, the trend towards coupling storage and compute on commodity hardware will pose more of challenge to enterprise storage vendors. We are still a ways away from having distributed databases or filesystems that run on commodity hardware with all the bells, whistles, tools, and management capabilities that the current generation of storage appliances have - but the this area is rapidly evolving.

What is your take on these trends?

Montauk evening http://instagr.am/p/LJqh-Hrnx5/

Sun, 27 May 2012 21:18:41 -0400

Montauk evening http://instagr.am/p/LJqh-Hrnx5/

Going to be a fun afternoon http://instagr.am/p/KQ0yihrn5_/

Sat, 05 May 2012 19:11:21 -0400

Going to be a fun afternoon http://instagr.am/p/KQ0yihrn5_/

necessary http://instagr.am/p/KJc4wjLn5z/

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:41:57 -0400

necessary http://instagr.am/p/KJc4wjLn5z/

cloud = employee enablement

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:37:00 -0400

Dear Amazon,

A few weeks ago, you published a whitepaper, “The Total Cost of (Non) Ownership
of a NoSQL Database Cloud Service”. The paper compares the cost of running an “open source NoSQL database” in a datacenter/co-lo vs. running it on EC2 and EBS vs. using DynamoDB. No surprises here - the TCO of using DynamoDB was the lowest followed by running on AWS, while running it in a private data center was the most expensive. I’m going to leave aside the fact this is an apples-to-oranges comparison (you can’t run dynamo in your own data center, SSDs for dynamo while EBS for other software, etc). Instead, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you shouldn’t be making cloud = lower cost argument at at all.

The real benefit of moving application development to ‘the cloud’ comes from increased agility and flexibility. Need to get a new application up and running quickly? You can just boot up some machines. Think there is some value in your log files? Instantiate a couple of hundred bucks worth of EMR nodes and take a shot at analyzing them. Building on cloud-like infrastructure allows developers to iterate and experiment, without the headaches of things like long hardware procurement cycles. Pair that with great open source software or managed services and you have lowered the barrier for developers to create something that is potentially great. That is something you can’t put a price on.

I know you know this, but here is what I think you should be telling companies:
- The way traditional IT organizations operate causes friction
- Developers don’t like friction
- You need to empower your developers to build, iterate and experiment
- Moving to AWS helps you do that
- Along with instant compute resources, you have great open source software you can use
- Or, we build and manage our own software for you (DynamoDB, Elastic MapReduce, Simple Workflow service, etc)
- By not moving to the cloud you are slowing down your employees
- Embrace it or be left behind
(and btw, you may save a few bucks in the process)

You should be shouting this from the rooftops, rather than trying to make the age old argument of lower TCO. Will you piss off some CIOs or a few large enterprise software companies? Yes, maybe. But fuck it. You are Amazon. You defined e-commerce. And now you are defining what the cloud means to hundreds of thousands of software developers.

Sincerely,

Nosh

That's a Billion with a 'B' (and more to come)

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:11:16 -0400

A couple of weeks ago Red Hat announced that it had crossed a billion dollars in revenue over its fiscal year that ended in March. This marked the first time a company solely focussed on selling open source software crossed a billion dollars in annual revenue.

A lot written over the last few weeks about Red Hat, but I thought that some older articles more accurately reflected what Red Hat (and many open source companies) are doing. This ComputerWorld article from June 2010 is instructive because it quotes Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, on how open source software is displacing revenues of traditional enterprise software vendors and thereby collapsing the size of existing markets. Another interesting one is this one from the New York Times where Whitehurst talks about the impact of open source on company culture.

It took Red Hat a long time to get to the billion dollar mark, but I’m fairly confident that there will be many more to follow. There are a few fundamental shifts that are underway.
- The shift to cloud-like (IaaS, PaaS, etc) architectures is giving software developers an opportunity to move more quickly with minimal interference and involvement from traditional IT (despite how blasphemous this may sound to a CIO)
- As a result of this increased agility, choices for software are being increasingly decided from the bottom up by developers themselves, rather than being pushed from the top down.
- When choosing the software to use, developers default to the choices that enable them to accomplish their task with minimal friction- which most often is open source software

This cycle is going to lead to lot more companies able to build strong business creating and selling open source software, most likely at the expense of traditional enterprise software vendors.

Interesting perspective. Not sure if I subscribe to it, though.....

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 21:41:35 -0400

Interesting perspective. Not sure if I subscribe to it, though.. http://instagr.am/p/JbAUSNrn8i/

Trending hashtags on twitter in 3 steps with MongoDB

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:51:00 -0400

One of the upcoming features of MongoDB is the new aggregation framework.
Here is an quick example to get you started. In 3 simple steps, you can be calculating the trending hashtags on twitter.

Step 1: If you haven’t already, download and install MongoDB v2.1
Here is what I do on my mac:

Noshs-MacBook-Air:~ nosh$ curl http://downloads.mongodb.org/osx/mongodb-osx-x86_64-2.1.0.tgz > mongo.tgz
Noshs-MacBook-Air:~ nosh$ tar xzf mongo.tgz
Noshs-MacBook-Air:~ nosh$ sudo mkdir -p /data/db/
Noshs-MacBook-Air:~ nosh$ sudo chown `id -u` /data/db
Noshs-MacBook-Air:~ nosh$ ./mongodb-osx-x86_64-2.1.0/bin/mongod

Now your MongoDB 2.1.0 server is up and running

Step 2: Get some twitter data into MongoDB
This is surprisingly simple. Since twitter’s streaming API outputs JSON, you can pipe it directly into MongoDB with mongoimport. Just run this command:

curl https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.json -uUSERNAME:PASSWORD | ./mongoimport -d twitter1 -c tweets

(substitute your twitter username and password)

This will start streaming a sample (about 1%) of twitter status updates into a MongoDB collection called ‘tweets’ in a database called 'twitter1’. There are a lot of fields in each doc. Check out the Twitter API documentation to see what gets sent with each status update

Step 3: Startup the MongoDB shell and run this query

Noshs-MacBook-Air:~ nosh$ ./mongodb-osx-x86_64-2.1.0/bin/mongo
MongoDB shell version: 2.1.0
connecting to: test
> use twitter1
> db.tweets.aggregate({$sort:{"_id":-1}}, {$match: {"entities.hashtags.text":{$exists:true}}}, {$limit:10000},{$unwind:"$entities.hashtags"}, {$project : {"entities.hashtags.text":1,"_id":0}}, {$group:{"_id":{$toLower:"$entities.hashtags.text"}, count : { $sum : 1 }}}, {$sort:{"count":-1}}, {$limit:5})

That looks a bit complicated. Its actually not. Here is what is happening:

db.tweets.aggregate(

//let's take the 10,000 most recent tweets with hashtags
{$sort:{"_id":-1}}), {$match: {"entities.hashtags.text":{$exists:true}}},{$limit:10000}, 

//hashtags are stored in an array, so separate them out              
{$unwind:"$entities.hashtags"}, 

// use the text of the hashtag
{$project : {"entities.hashtags.text":1,"_id":0}}, 

//group on the hashtag and add 1 for every occurrence
{$group:{"_id":{$toLower:"$entities.hashtags.text"}, count : { $sum : 1 }}}, 

//finally sort the result and only show me the top 5
{$sort:{"count":1}}, {$limit:5});

And here is what I get

{
        "result" : [
                {
                        "_id" : "wrestlemania",
                        "count" : 682
                },
                {
                        "_id" : "acms",
                        "count" : 246
                },
                {
                        "_id" : "promocaocdbrasil",
                        "count" : 194
                },
                {
                        "_id" : "paniconaband",
                        "count" : 139
                },
                {
                        "_id" : "teamfollowback",
                        "count" : 122
                }
        ],
        "ok" : 1
}
>

I guess Wrestlemania is pretty popular right now!
Pretty simple, right? Let me know if you come up with some more examples.

Thinking of partnering with 10gen? Here is something to consider

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:49:25 -0500

Jaspersoft released their “Big Data index” which tracks how many downloads they get for each of the connectors they have built for their business intelligence suite. Over the past year, the most downloads have come from their Hadoop connectors. MongoDB is the fastest growing, though, and accounts now for the most downloads per month.

If you are a company looking to boost your activity around the big data/NoSQL/database areas - MongoDB might just be the right horse for you to bet on.

Here is an infographic highlighting the traction they have been getting over time with each of their connectors:

http://10gen.com/partners

Why I like a good 3-Way

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:06:28 -0500

I’ve written some about life at 10gen, about open source software, and about MongoDB. But I haven’t written much about what I do at 10gen. I work on partnerships, alliances, and ecosystem development at 10gen (yes, very vague!). Here is a taste of some of things I’m working on and thinking about:

Yesterday, we announced that Engine Yard, MongoHQ and MongoLab have partnered with 10gen. This is good news for MongoDB users (or anyone thinking of using MongoDB), as it gives them additional ways to deploy their MongoDB applications, with the backing of the 10gen support (read details here). As good as that is, though, I’m excited on what’s next - to work with these providers to make MongoDB a better database, to drive innovation around the mongo platform, and of course to grow our respective businesses.

Another very interesting angle is that that is opens up additional avenues for multi-way collaborations. Engine Yard, as a platform-as-a-service already has a thriving ecosystem, while MongoLab and MongoHQ each have their own growing ecosystem that includes Heroku, CloudBees, AppHarbor - just to name a few. It will be interesting to see if and how we can combine forces to build really interesting solutions.

Another example of this - in December, Jaspersoft announced their updated BI connector for MongoDB (if you are interested in learning more - check out the docs and this webinar). A few months later, Jaspersoft announced support for CloudFoundry and OpenShift. We’ve been collaborating with Red Hat on OpenShift, and with VMware on CloudFoundry. So suddenly you have one click (or one API call) app + mongo + BI. Pretty cool, right?

So, yes - I like a menage-a-trois (or, perhaps even a menage-a-quatre) and the opportunity it presents :)

test photo

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:33:28 -0500

test photo

JetBlue or Delta? Which one is your startup going to be when it grows up?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:29:00 -0500

I fly a fair amount. Between business and personal travel, I probably flew close to 125,000 miles last year - most of them on Delta. Now I like Delta - they fly direct or with good connections to most places I travel to, I get good perks for being a frequent flyer, and they have consistent and professional service. On a trip this week JetBlue was the quickest way to get me home, so I decided to try it. A few things stood out for me about the JetBlue experience-

No bullshit: When you fly Delta, one of the first things you are subjected to is a video from the CEO talking about how he “sits at the founder C. Woollman’s desk every day”, how Delta puts “safety first” and is “built on a foundation of honesty, integrity and mutual respect”. Even the first time you watch it, it comes across as a pile of nonsense copied verbatim from a marketing 101 playbook. To be forced to watch it every time you fly is downright torture. On JetBlue, there was none of that. Everything was highly professional, but without unnecessary rubbish that serves no purpose other than to give corporate marketers a hard on.

(Really) putting customer needs first: On JetBlue, the first thing you are handed on a red eye is small package called a ‘snooze kit’, which contains earplugs and a sleep mask. Its a simple way of signaling that they understand what is probably most important to you. On Delta red eyes, they make an announcement to announce that they are “going to keep announcements to a minimum” (wtf?) and then proceed to list off every “coca-cola” beverage in the drink cart (ok I get it - you are both Atlanta companies. Coke probably gives you a sweet deal. I don’t give a shit. Just let me sleep)

You can be efficient, but with a personal touch: Everything from Jet Blue’s website to their boarding process was extremely efficient. Yet every time I interacted with their staff, it seemed genuine and personal. In comparison, Delta’s staff seems to have just rolled off the assembly line of some strange finishing school for airline professionals.

So why is this important? As a startup grows out of infancy it needs to project a professional image and put processes in place to scale efficiently. But that doesn’t mean forgetting what is important to its customers or losing its personality. Thanks JetBlue for reminding me of this.

Twitter's (not so) subtle plan to capture the Indian market

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:04:19 -0500

I’m in India for a few weeks. I went to twitter.com and was greeted with this page:

and here is who Twitter thought I should follow when I logged in:

Aamir Khan and Sachin Tendulkar

I guess twitter knows what is important in India! #cricket #bollywood

Its been an interesting year for open source software

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:31:00 -0500

As December rolls around its time to take stock of the past year. It has been just over two years since I joined 10gen to work on MongoDB and I’ve started to understand the impact of open source on the software development process, as a business strategy and as a way to build communities. Looking back, 2011 has been quite a phenomenal year for open source projects and companies.

Without a doubt, the open source project that generated the most buzz this year is Hadoop, which was started over 5 years ago for processing and analyzing large amounts of data. Spurred on by the interest in ‘big data’, Hadoop made huge advances this year - and even had two of its most prominent commercial backers, Hortonworks and Cloudera battling over who has contributed more code to the project. Hadoop is a prime example of the virtuous cycle with open source: developers are attracted to interesting open source projects. Assuming the project is good, it is used and improved by the community. Eventually, high profile successes create more mainstream awareness, which snowballs into more development, investment, and a large ecosystem around around the project. While open source doesn’t imply success, the spirit of collaboration and transparency embodied by many open source projects serve as a catalyst for kick starting the cycle. If 2011 is any indication - as an understanding that open source is more than just free software becomes prevalent - we’ll start to see an increasing amount of software developed according to open source principles. Regardless of whether this is done by companies or individual developers, the tech industry at large will benefit from this.

Big companies bet big (and small) on open source

2011 saw a number of the large technology companies launch new open source initiatives and I’ve picked 4 which best illustrate the way companies are embracing open source:

VMware: One of the boldest moves in open source this year was the release of CloudFoundry by VMware. Released under an Apache license on GitHub, the platform-as-a-service has rapidly gained a large ecosystem around it with companies contributing language support and incorporating it into commercial products. CloudFoundry shows how putting open source front-and-center can enable a company to work with the open source community to rapidly advance a platform.

Microsoft: Last week, Microsoft made some strong moves towards creating a receptive environment for open source software on its Windows Azure cloud platform. In a wide ranging announcement, it open sourced Azure SDKs for .NET, Java and NodeJS and enabled support for Apache Hadoop and MongoDB on Azure. Microsoft’s moves highlights the growing importance of both interoperating with open source software, as well as pursuing a more transparent development process.

Dell: While not very well known, Dell’s crowbar project is interesting as it shows how a hardware company can contribute open source software in order to drive innovation and add value to a complimentary platform (in this case server hardware). Crowbar builds on Chef and allows one to provision and configure software like OpenStack, CloudFoundry, and Hadoop to Dell (and potentially other) hardware.

eBay/PayPal: The new x.commerce platform is going to be interesting to watch over the next year. Built on open source projects such as Ubuntu, OpenStack, CloudFoundry, Hadoop and MongoDB, it aims to both expose the capabilities of eBay (PayPal, Magento,

Milo, etc) and give developers a platform to deliver commerce applications to merchants. Development of the core API and parts of the platform are open sourced with a developer kit available for download. Watch chief architect Jeromy Carriere’s talk to understand why eBay is betting so big on open source (and his “open source is free like puppy” analogy is great!)

Open source = $$$$

The other big trend this year was investment in open source companies. Indications are that 2011 has had the largest amount of VC money invested (close to $700m) in companies whose core business is open source software. This has largely been driven by interest in cloud and big data technologies. Some of most innovative technologies that are coming out in these areas are open source, and traditional software vendors have often been left trying to play catchup. This is markedly different from previous open source successes (such as MySQL, JBoss, RedHat), which though innovative in their own way were (arguably) replacements for existing technologies.

While some might attribute the dollars to an investment bubble - there seems to be some sound rationale behind the investments. The question looming over any business that develops open source software is whether it can effectively monetize the usage of its software. If RedHat’s recent performance (beating market expectations 6 quarters in a row) is any indication, the answer is most definitely yes.

Will it continue?

With very high profile open source projects, traditional technology companies embracing open source, and investments flowing in 2011 - the question is whether this will continue. My belief is that we are in the midst of transformational change in the way software is developed, marketed, packaged and sold. The advent of cloud infrastructure services such as Amazon has dramatically lowered the cost of acquiring computing infrastructure and is freeing developers from the contraints of a traditional IT procurement process. Developers are gravitating towards not just the best software to solve their problems, but towards a process by which they can openly and transparently engage with the development community - which open source promotes. As a result, I think we’ll see a lot more great code open sourced and I’m looking forward to 2012.

[Disclosure: As part of my role at 10gen, I work with many of the companies mentioned in this post]

Open source is the lean startup methodology for enterprise infrastructure software

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:16:47 -0500

It isn’t a perfect analogy, but there are interesting parallels between the lean startup methodology and developing open source software. Something to think about for companies who are developing enterprise infrastructure software (which isn’t always amenable to lean methods)

Lean startup	Open Source	Examples
Minimum viable product	version “0.x”	MongoDB v0.8
Customer development	Public mailing lists, open roadmaps, IRC, pull requests	MongoDB mailing list, MongoDB feature/bug database
Continuous deployment	Nightly builds	MongoDB buildbot
Metrics	GitHub watchers, downloads	Most watched projects

Now I just need think of parallels for ‘pivot’ and 'product-market fit’ :)

HelloMongo - a MongoDB community dashboard

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:33:53 -0500

I had some time this weekend, so I hacked together HelloMongo, which is a dashboard that shows a lot of the community and development activity for the MongoDB project. It pulls together mailing list activity, twitter feeds, GitHub commit logs and JIRA issues to give a snapshot of what is happening in the MongoDB community.

The motivation for the project was two-fold. Firstly, I wanted an easy way to see recent MongoDB community activity without having to visit a a bunch of different websites. Secondly, although the vast majority of our software development and community interaction is done in the open, you need to know what you are looking for - so this was an effort to make it more accessible for people who aren’t deeply active in the MongoDB community.

It was surprising easy to do and I had a prototype working in a couple of hours. Most systems we use (google groups, GitHub, JIRA, etc) have APIs to get XML/RSS feeds of data. I then used the bootstrap project from twitter for the layout of the page, as well a some jQuery plugins for parsing the data.

Would love feedback on whether people find this useful. And of course, the project is open source, so feel free to play around with it. Some ideas for enhancements:

- Make the feeds refresh automatically (so you don’t have to hit reload)

- Find some interesting data that is public (e.g. mongodb buildbot status??) and integrate it into the dashboard

- Integrate real-time stats and trends into the dashboard e.g. how many commits this month, etc

It would also be very cool if other companies either used the code (or just the concept) to build public dashboards for what was happening in their respective communities. If you do that, let me know about it.

Building this out got me thinking - one thing I’d love to have is a single database, where all our activity was logged. That would make it really interesting - not only could you build some really interesting dashboards, but also use it to analyze/predict/improve on what we and the community is doing. Perhaps a project for another weekend?!

MongoSV: Top 5 Reasons to be there

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:06:00 -0500

MongoSV is a one-day MongoDB conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center on December 9th. Our last conference in the Bay Area was sold out, so don’t wait until the last minute to get your ticket. Here are my top 5 reasons to go.

1. Learn

MongoSV is going to be packed with interesting content. Whether you are just starting to evaluate NoSQL databases or you are a long term user of MongoDB you will come away having learned something. Some of my picks:

- If you are just getting started: Check out the “Building your first MongoDB application”, “Schema Design Principles and Practice” and “How and When to Scale MongoDB with Sharding”
- If you want to understand the internals of MongoDB: “Life of a MongoDB Query”, "MongoDB’s Storage Engine Bit-by-Bit", “The MongoDB Magical Mystery Tour” talks are sure to be interesting
- If you are managing or about to manage a production deployment, then head over to the “MongoDB Survival Kit” or “Unbreakable: Deploying MongoDB for High Availability” talks

2. Meet the team

Many of the 10gen team will be there, so its a great opportunity to say hi. In addition to the scheduled talks, there will be whiteboard sessions throughout the day with @dmerr, @mathias_mongo, @hwaet, Richard, Paul and @eliothorowitz

3. Hear about real-life deployments

Ever wanted to know what its like to run and manage a MongoDB production deployment? We’ll have a bunch of users presenting about their use cases and experiences. The one I’m particularly interested in seeing is by PayPal/x.commerce on how on they are using MongoDB and a number of other open source projects for their new x.commerce platform.

4. See what the industry is up to

Amazon, Rackspace, VMware, RedHat, Microsoft, MongoHQ, MongoLab, Joyent, dotCloud, RightScale, Fusion-io, Virident, Nebula, Canonical, Jaspersoft and Pentaho will all be at MongoSV. So head over to their talks, stop by their booths to get some cool demos and hear their take on cloud platforms, open source, big data, and how they are weaving MongoDB into their products and services.

5. Have fun

There will be prizes. And good coffee (I hope). Maybe some redbull too. And, of course, an after party to end the day. If you are coming from San Francisco you can just hop on the “MongoDB Motors” chartered bus for door-to-door service.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to mongosv.com and use the code ‘noshblog’ for 25% off

See you there!

Optimism and pessimism: a Saturday in NYC

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 19:09:00 -0400

This weekend I had the pleasure of representing 10gen at Silicon Alley 500, a recruiting event designed to bring together 500 smart engineers to meet 50 innovative tech companies. Held on the floor of the NYSE, the event was full of energy. The job seekers, many of whom were graduating from college, were excited at the prospect of joining cutting edge companies. And the companies relished the opportunity to recruit a new generation of employees to help take their companies to the next level.

Walking to or from the event, though, it was hard not to notice the Occupy Wall Street protests. Whether you agree with the protests or not, it seems clear to me that the protesters are disillusioned with what they perceive as a lack of opportunity stemming from a system that promotes the interests of a few over the interests of the majority.

The contrast of optimism at the SA500 event, with the pessimism embodied by the protests outside made me wonder about the role that startups can play. Certainly we are creating jobs - which is sorely needed - but is there a broader role that startups can play? Are there ways that startups can help stem the feeling of pessimism that seems to be growing in this country? Are they ways that startups, either individually or collectively, can be a positive force in the discussion? Are there policies we should be putting in place as we grow that will prevent the general resentment towards large corporations? I don’t have the answers, but its worth thinking about if you work at a startup. I will be.