Flexible Sync Delivers Device Data to the Cloud in Real-Time

Emma Lullo
June 7, 2022 | Updated: August 1, 2023
#MongoDB World

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Flexible Sync, the next iteration of Atlas Device Sync, MongoDB’s synchronization solution between the popular client-side database Realm and MongoDB Atlas. Flexible Sync introduces significant architectural enhancements to Device Sync that improve developer productivity and further reduce the complexity of managing separate data technologies when connecting mobile and embedded devices to the cloud.

At its core, Flexible Sync enables synchronization of only the data that’s relevant to a given user or device. For example, Wanderland, a new virtual reality social media application, needed a solution that synchronized data across devices in real time, allowing users to publish geo-located AR content and discover content created by their peers. “The new Flexible Sync feature in Atlas Device Sync elegantly solves geo-partitioning issues by allowing us to only synchronize nearby spatialized content relevant to each user,” Jonathan Thorpe, the lead VR/AR developer at Wanderland, says.

Additionally, we are expanding our device platform support with the GA of our Kotlin SDK, which includes Kotlin Multiplatform support, and the preview release of our Flutter SDK.

Increase developer productivity with query-based sync

With Flexible Sync, we are introducing a new way of configuring sync that is more analogous to the way developers sync and code. Now, developers will be able to define synced data using language-native queries that can dynamically update based on user-defined inputs, which means that as a user updates app filters or preferences, the data being synced to the device will update efficiently and in real-time.

Handle sensitive information with field-level permissions

The introduction of Flexible Sync also means data synchronization can be tailored and limited based on a user’s role down to field-level granularity. This is an industry-leading feature that is especially critical for apps handling sensitive PII or PHI data, ensuring that not only is protected data not visible in the UI, but it is never on the synced device to begin with.

Support write-heavy workloads with asymmetric sync

We recognize that with the need for real-time visibility, there is an increasing occurrence of write-heavy workloads that require low-latency sync from embedded devices to the cloud. The new release of Flexible Sync offers full support for asymmetric sync from devices to the cloud that is optimized for write-heavy workloads and syncs directly to time-series collections on MongoDB.

New language, framework, and platform support (Kotlin, Flutter, MAUI, and WatchOS)

Alongside the release of Flexible Sync, we are announcing support for several new mobile frameworks and platforms:

  • Realm Kotlin – Now GA: Prior to this release, Android developers used our Realm Java SDK within Kotlin apps. The new GA release of the Realm Kotlin SDK—that includes full Kotlin Multiplatform support—offers idiomatic, Kotlin-first APIs for developers using Kotlin in their mobile apps.

  • Realm Flutter – Now in preview: As Flutter support is the top requested feature for Realm, we are excited to confirm the preview release of our Realm Flutter SDK, which will allow developers to begin testing sync in their Flutter applications.

  • Realm .NET – Now with support for MAUI and Unity: The Realm team recently released MAUI support into preview for developers looking to take advantage of Microsoft’s newest framework, in addition to the Unity support that was added last year.

  • Realm React Native – Now with support for Hermes: The latest release of Realm React Native includes support for Hermes to help JS developers keep their mobile applications fast and lightweight.

Getting started with MongoDB Atlas Device Sync

If you’re ready to start building with Device Sync, getting started is easy. Sign up or log in to your cloud account, deploy an App Services app, select your sync type, and dive right in.

We’re excited to see what you build! Join our community forums to share your project, leave feedback, ask questions, and connect with other developers using MongoDB Atlas Device Sync and Realm.

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Working Together: MongoDB's Partner of the Year Awards

Organizations face more pressure than ever to modernize, to innovate, and to become more data-driven. Whether it's AstraZeneca doing next-generation genome sequencing to develop drugs to fight cancer and other diseases, Toyota connecting more than 100,000 warehouse vehicles with integrated telematics to reshape industrialization, or Forbes developing new ways to create and deploy content, many of the world's top companies have chosen to modernize with MongoDB. Today, more than 35,000 customers trust the MongoDB Atlas data platform with their most critical workloads. But we don’t do it alone. MongoDB's partner ecosystem has scaled to every vertical, industry, and geography, delivering MongoDB to tens of thousands of customers. MongoDB partners play many roles in the ecosystem, from extending MongoDB's developer data platform with complementary functionality to building new solutions on MongoDB to offering expertise to implement and modernize databases. Now, we are pleased to announce the 2022 MongoDB Partners of the Year. Although we are grateful for all of the many partners that help MongoDB succeed with customers, this year at MongoDB World we are recognizing a select few that have worked especially closely with us to drive joint success in the past year. The 2022 MongoDB Partners of the Year are Accenture , Alibaba Cloud , AWS , BigID , Capgemini , Carahsoft , commercetools , Confluent , Exafluence , Google Cloud , HCL Technologies , IBM , PeerIslands , Tecnotree , Temenos , and Unqork . We will honor these companies at our partner VIP reception on June 6, 2022. Global System Integrator Partner of the Year Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions across strategy, consulting, applied intelligence, technology, and operations. A core tenet of Accenture’s “Cloud Continuum” approach indicates that the companies who achieve the most value from their cloud transformation journeys are those who go beyond “lift and shift” migrations and drive to “move and improve” their applications onto the cloud. Thus, Accenture is investing heavily in upskilling their consultants on MongoDB, as well as building assets to accelerate their clients’ MongoDB transformations. One example is Smart Data Mover, an Accenture asset designed to simplify and accelerate the process of modernizing legacy applications from relational database systems to MongoDB Atlas on the cloud. As a result, Accenture has been an essential partner in helping enterprises modernize with MongoDB. Learn more about the partnership. Boutique System Integrator Partner of the Year PeerIslands is a service consulting firm focused on providing high-velocity digital transformation. PeerIslands won the Boutique Systems Integrator Partner of the Year in 2021 as well, in recognition of their expertise and outstanding work in the MongoDB ecosystem. The firm consults on cloud transformation strategy and partners on product and data engineering, application transformation, and data science and AI/ML. In addition, PeerIslands has developed a suite of tools that allow for easy adoption of MongoDB and seamless migration of workloads to MongoDB within enterprises. Learn more about the partnership. Rising Star System Integrator Partner of the Year Capgemini is one of the world's foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. Capgemini and MongoDB have partnered to help re-envision data and advanced business processes so its clients can focus on innovation. Traditional relational database management systems often inhibit performance, falter under heavy volumes, and slow deployment. Capgemini’s new Database Convert & Compare (DCC) tool, built on MongoDB, helps customers develop a new database or migrate from legacy systems to MongoDB. CapGemini has helped grow MongoDB’s footprint in some of the largest Fortune 100 financial services customers contributing large revenue numbers through the partnership, and it has been instrumental in driving MongoDB adoption by identifying new workloads and implementing new use cases for digital transformation, legacy modernization, and app modernization for financial services customers. Learn more about the partnership. System Integrator Certification Partner of the Year HCL Technologies (HCL) is a leading global technology company, helping enterprises reimagine their businesses for the digital age. Their technology products and services are built on four decades of innovation, with a world-renowned management philosophy, a strong culture of invention and risk-taking, and a relentless focus on customer relationships. HCL is partnering with MongoDB across Cloud Migration, Digital Business, and Engineering Services. This award honors partners with the highest number of MongoDB certified champions across the globe, who are skilled to modernize and transform customers' application and infrastructure leveraging MongoDB technologies. Learn more about the partnership. Cloud (Co-Sell) Partner of the Year AWS provides a massive global cloud infrastructure that allows customers to rapidly innovate and iterate. In 2022, AWS and MongoDB entered into a six-year collaboration agreement , which has placed the partnership into hypergrowth. MongoDB and AWS sellers have come together to help customers modernize, accelerate consumption of AWS customer commits, win new workloads, and close on major cross-industry and cross-vertical deals around the world. MongoDB and AWS have also partnered to help customers build modern, event-driven serverless applications, while releasing integrations for Atlas with Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Kinesis, AWS App Runner, AWS PrivateLink, AWS Wavelength, and more in the past year. The launch of Pay-as-You-Go option on AWS Marketplace made it easier for customers to pay for MongoDB Atlas using their AWS account. With additional integrations in the pipeline, there’s so much more to come. Learn more about the partnership. Cloud (Marketplace) Partner of the Year Google Cloud views the data platform as an essential building block of cloud infrastructure. Since launching MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Marketplace over the past three years, this partnership has seen rapid adoption and acceleration across industries such as gaming, retail, healthcare, financial services, and automotive. We have integrated MongoDB Atlas with more Google services, including DataStream, BigQuery, DataFlow, Cloud Run, App Engine, Apigee, and Cloud Functions, while also introducing a Pay-as-You-Go option on the Google Cloud Console and Marketplace . More and more Google Cloud customers are choosing to run MongoDB Atlas for a variety of needs, including managing large-scale product catalogs of popular e-commerce websites, building great customer experiences by unifying disparate pieces of data, and building modern global web and mobile applications. Learn more about the partnership. Cloud (Emerging Markets) Partner of the Year Alibaba Cloud is one of MongoDB’s largest Cloud OEM partners. In our third year of partnership with Alibaba Cloud as an authorized MongoDB-as-a-service solution, MongoDB has seen some of its strongest adoption numbers in mainland China, especially in the gaming and automotive industries. With this partnership, Alibaba Cloud ensures end-to-end management and support for customers on current and future versions of MongoDB, with the ability to escalate bug fixes and support issues on their behalf. Users of Alibaba Cloud’s platform offering receive easy access to the latest MongoDB features and capabilities, backed by comprehensive support from Alibaba Cloud and MongoDB. We remain thrilled to further scale this partnership. Try MongoDB on Alibaba Cloud . Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year (Financial Services) Temenos offers cloud-native, cloud-agnostic, API-first digital banking, core banking, payments, fund management, and wealth management software products, enabling banks to deliver consistent, frictionless customer journeys and achieve market-leading cost/income performance. More than 3,800 banks across the globe rely on Temenos to process the client interactions and daily transactions of more than 500 million customers. MongoDB underpins Temenos Transact, which is the most successful and widely used digital core-banking solution in the world. Temenos also selected MongoDB as foundational technology for their microservices transformation journey as they deliver their flagship product, Infinity Digital Banking. Together, we help banks and financial institutions comply with stringent data sovereignty requirements and scale seamlessly. Learn more about the partnership. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year (Telco) Tecnotree is a digital business support systems (BSS) and digital partner ecosystem provider with more than 40 years of deep domain knowledge, proven delivery, and transformation capability. The company offers digital solutions for Communication & Digital Service Providers across the globe. Leveraging MongoDB technology, Tecnotree delivers world-class BSS and partner ecosystem solutions for telcos, empowering them to deliver insightful and connected customer experiences to their enterprises, consumers and partners. MongoDB powers Tecnotree’s Digital Customer Lifecycle Management Suite, empowering communications service providers (CSPs) to transform their business towards a marketplace of digital services. Learn more about the partnership. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year (Healthcare) Exafluence is a domain-centric data and analytics company that utilizes modern digital technologies to enhance the competitive advantage of its customers in their markets. Exafluence brings in low-code platforms, accelerators, and expertise across a range of digital technologies to reduce time by 45% to 60% and cost by 25% to 30%, while delivering significantly higher business value. Exafluence has built a variety of technical and business solutions that can be assembled together and customized for specific business scenarios. Some of its key platform offerings include ExfDigital (Data), ExfInsights (Analytics), ExfHealth (Healthcare), and ExfIndustry (IoT). Learn more about the partnership. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year (Retail) Commercetools ’ world-leading commerce platform, built on modern MACH principles (microservice-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless), is driving the future of digital commerce. Fully powered by MongoDB Atlas, the Commercetools suite allows brands to work with, not around, their commerce solution to tailor experiences to the exact needs of the business and its customers. Through this partnership, Commercetools has made MongoDB the optimal system of record for an even broader range of business-critical applications. Learn more about the partnership. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year (Security) BigID’s data intelligence and privacy platform allows customers to rely on actual data discovered across the enterprise and cloud, rather than surveys and interviews, to ensure privacy compliance. To generate data insights at scale, automate advanced discovery and classification, and accommodate complex enterprise requirements, BigID chose MongoDB to power their platform. MongoDB’s data platform provides a flexible, reliable and scalable solution to customers across any vertical. Learn more about the partnership. Technology Partner of the Year Founded by the original developers of Apache Kafka, Confluent delivers the most complete distribution of Kafka with Confluent Platform. Real-time event streaming (data-in-motion) from Confluent complements the modern general-purpose distributed document database platform (for data-at-rest) from MongoDB, enabling organizations to run their business in real-time and to build fast-moving applications enriched with historical context. Learn more about the partnership. Distributor Partner of the Year Carahsoft is a trusted, long-standing MongoDB partner, and it continues to be one of our largest resellers in the world. Carahsoft’s depth and reach in the public sector market helps government agencies leverage open technologies to drive innovation, maximize cost efficiencies, and achieve success for their digital modernization initiatives. The company has been critical to growing MongoDB’s government agency and civilian business, and we’re excited for what’s next. Learn more about the partnership. Hybrid Cloud Partner of the Year IBM is a global technology company that provides infrastructure, software, hybrid cloud services, and cognitive computing to global enterprise clients. IBM played an instrumental role in helping one of the world’s largest banks launch their internal MongoDB-as-a-service on the IBM LinuxONE platform for their most critical financial applications. Our strategic partnership has helped customers powering applications on IBM Power platform and those requiring a fully managed database-as-a-service on IBM Cloud. Our OEM Partnership with Data & AI solutions and integration with IBM Cloud Pak for Data (ICP) has helped create success stories at large enterprises across the globe. By leveraging the flexibility of MongoDB on IBM Cloud Pak for Data, customers can get to market faster, iterate faster, and attract new customers faster, without sacrificing security or control. Learn more about the partnership. MongoDB for Startups Program to Unicorn Partner of the Year Unqork ’s enterprise no-code platform helps leading organizations build, deploy, and manage complex software without having to think about code. Unqork created the codeless architecture standard to free the world’s largest enterprises from the pitfalls of legacy code and allow them to focus on innovation to drive business and maintain a competitive edge. In 2017, also the year of its founding, Unqork joined the MongoDB for Startups program, which gave them free access to get started on MongoDB Atlas. Since then, Unqork has raised $414 million in funding and is valued at $2 billion. MongoDB is thrilled for Unqork’s success and honored to be a part of their journey. Learn more about the partnership. Learn more about being a MongoDB partner. Visit our list of partners to see all of our partners.

June 6, 2022
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Retrieval Augmented Generation for Claim Processing: Combining MongoDB Atlas Vector Search and Large Language Models

Following up on our previous blog, AI, Vectors, and the Future of Claims Processing: Why Insurance Needs to Understand The Power of Vector Databases , we’ll pick up the conversation right where we left it. We discussed extensively how Atlas Vector Search can benefit the claim process in insurance and briefly covered Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs). MongoDB.local NYC Join us in person on May 2, 2024 for our keynote address, announcements, and technical sessions to help you build and deploy mission-critical applications at scale. Use Code Web50 for 50% off your ticket! Learn More One of the biggest challenges for claim adjusters is pulling and aggregating information from disparate systems and diverse data formats. PDFs of policy guidelines might be stored in a content-sharing platform, customer information locked in a legacy CRM, and claim-related pictures and voice reports in yet another tool. All of this data is not just fragmented across siloed sources and hard to find but also in formats that have been historically nearly impossible to index with traditional methods. Over the years, insurance companies have accumulated terabytes of unstructured data in their data stores but have failed to capitalize on the possibility of accessing and leveraging it to uncover business insights, deliver better customer experiences, and streamline operations. Some of our customers even admit they’re not fully aware of all the data in their archives. There’s a tremendous opportunity to leverage this unstructured data to benefit the insurer and its customers. Our image search post covered part of the solution to these challenges, opening the door to working more easily with unstructured data. RAG takes it a step further, integrating Atlas Vector Search and LLMs, thus allowing insurers to go beyond the limitations of baseline foundational models, making them context-aware by feeding them proprietary data. Figure 1 shows how the interaction works in practice: through a chat prompt, we can ask questions to the system, and the LLM returns answers to the user and shows what references it used to retrieve the information contained in the response. Great! We’ve got a nice UI, but how can we build an RAG application? Let’s open the hood and see what’s in it! Figure 1: UI of the claim adjuster RAG-powered chatbot Architecture and flow Before we start building our application, we need to ensure that our data is easily accessible and in one secure place. Operational Data Layers (ODLs) are the recommended pattern for wrangling data to create single views. This post walks the reader through the process of modernizing insurance data models with Relational Migrator, helping insurers migrate off legacy systems to create ODLs. Once the data is organized in our MongoDB collections and ready to be consumed, we can start architecting our solution. Building upon the schema developed in the image search post , we augment our documents by adding a few fields that will allow adjusters to ask more complex questions about the data and solve harder business challenges, such as resolving a claim in a fraction of the time with increased accuracy. Figure 2 shows the resulting document with two highlighted fields, “claimDescription” and its vector representation, “claimDescriptionEmbedding” . We can now create a Vector Search index on this array, a key step to facilitate retrieving the information fed to the LLM. Figure 2: document schema of the claim collection, the highlighted fields are used to retrieve the data that will be passed as context to the LLM Having prepared our data, building the RAG interaction is straightforward; refer to this GitHub repository for the implementation details. Here, we’ll just discuss the high-level architecture and the data flow, as shown in Figure 3 below: The user enters the prompt, a question in natural language. The prompt is vectorized and sent to Atlas Vector Search; similar documents are retrieved. The prompt and the retrieved documents are passed to the LLM as context. The LLM produces an answer to the user (in natural language), considering the context and the prompt. Figure 3: RAG architecture and interaction flow It is important to note how the semantics of the question are preserved throughout the different steps. The reference to “adverse weather” related accidents in the prompt is captured and passed to Atlas Vector Search, which surfaces claim documents whose claim description relates to similar concepts (e.g., rain) without needing to mention them explicitly. Finally, the LLM consumes the relevant documents to produce a context-aware question referencing rain, hail, and fire, as we’d expect based on the user's initial question. So what? To sum it all up, what’s the benefit of combining Atlas Vector Search and LLMs in a Claim Processing RAG application? Speed and accuracy: Having the data centrally organized and ready to be consumed by LLMs, adjusters can find all the necessary information in a fraction of the time. Flexibility: LLMs can answer a wide spectrum of questions, meaning applications require less upfront system design. There is no need to build custom APIs for each piece of information you’re trying to retrieve; just ask the LLM to do it for you. Natural interaction: Applications can be interrogated in plain English without programming skills or system training. Data accessibility: Insurers can finally leverage and explore unstructured data that was previously hard to access. Not just claim processing The same data model and architecture can serve additional personas and use cases within the organization: Customer Service: Operators can quickly pull customer data and answer complex questions without navigating different systems. For example, “Summarize this customer's past interactions,” “What coverages does this customer have?” or “What coverages can I recommend to this customer?” Customer self-service: Simplify your members’ experience by enabling them to ask questions themselves. For example, “My apartment is flooded. Am I covered?” or “How long do windshield repairs take on average?” Underwriting: Underwriters can quickly aggregate and summarize information, providing quotes in a fraction of the time. For example, “Summarize this customer claim history.” “I Am renewing a customer policy. What are the customer's current coverages? Pull everything related to the policy entity/customer. I need to get baseline info. Find relevant underwriting guidelines.” If you would like to discover more about Converged AI and Application Data Stores with MongoDB, take a look at the following resources: RAG for claim processing GitHub repository From Relational Databases to AI: An Insurance Data Modernization Journey Modernize your insurance data models with MongoDB and Relational Migrator

April 18, 2024