Building Modern Applications Faster: New Capabilities at MongoDB.local NYC 2024

Today, we kicked off MongoDB.local NYC and unveiled new capabilities across our developer data platform. The updates and capabilities announced today pave the way for a new era of app modernization and will allow developers to unleash the full potential of transformative technology like AI.

Here’s an overview of our announcements, from a comprehensive update to MongoDB to AI-powered intelligent developer experiences:

This post is also available in: Deutsch, Français, Español, Português, Italiano, 한국어, 简体中文.

Modern applications need a modern database

Cutting-edge modern applications must deliver both an exceptional experience and additional revenue. To meet these demands, developers require a database solution that offers optimal performance, scale, and operational resilience—while maintaining cost efficiency.

So today, we’re thrilled to announce the preview of MongoDB 8.0—the next evolution of MongoDB’s modern database.

MongoDB 8.0 is focused on delivering unparalleled performance, scalability, security, and operational resilience to support the creation of next-generation applications, including sophisticated AI-driven solutions. It provides optimal performance by dramatically increasing query performance, improving resilience during periods of heavy load, making scalability easier and more cost-effective, and making time series collections faster and more efficient.

Modernizing your next application with MongoDB is now easier

As application modernization projects gain momentum, migrations are becoming a pressing reality for development and database teams. Transitioning from legacy relational systems to modern databases like MongoDB is essential to keeping up with technological shifts like AI. However, modernization and migrations have many challenges, from converting complex schemas and translating large amounts of application code to keeping databases in sync during long modernization projects. Announced in June 2023, MongoDB Relational Migrator streamlines the migration process by automating tasks like schema design, data migrations, and application code generation.

Maintaining data synchronization is paramount in long-running modernization projects—where legacy relational databases must coexist with MongoDB until the project is complete. Today, we are pleased to announce that MongoDB Relational Migrator is now integrated with Confluent Cloud to support long-running change data capture (CDC) sync jobs. These jobs ensure operational resilience and observability, addressing the complexities of phased transitions without the added burden of managing Apache Kafka independently.

Screenshot of the AI-powered SQL Query Converter Tool that lives within MongoDB Relational Migrator

Furthermore, migrating from legacy relational databases often involves significant effort in rewriting SQL queries, stored procedures, and triggers, which has traditionally been time-consuming and difficult. Now available in public preview, an AI-powered SQL Query Converter Tool has been introduced to MongoDB Relational Migrator that automates the process of converting existing SQL queries, stored procedures, and triggers to work with MongoDB in languages like JavaScript, Java, or C#. This streamlined approach—paired with MongoDB professional services—enables a simplified migration process that can scale effectively.

Helping developers build faster with confidence on MongoDB

We recognize the vital role that developers play in the success of every project, which is why we’re dedicated to making their MongoDB experience as seamless as possible. Frameworks are a great way for developers to boost productivity, improve code consistency and quality, and ultimately deliver code faster. For the C# developer community, we are pleased to announce that the MongoDB Provider for Entity Framework Core (EF Core) is now generally available. This allows C# developers building with EF Core to unlock the full power of MongoDB's developer data platform—while still using the EF Core APIs and design patterns they already know and love.

And, recognizing the needs of the PHP community, we’re also proud to introduce the Laravel Aggregation Builder. This feature simplifies the process of building complex aggregation queries within Laravel, the most popular framework among PHP developers. By enhancing the integration of MongoDB with Laravel, we aim to boost productivity and ease the complexity of query operations, ensuring PHP developers can also enjoy an optimized development experience with MongoDB.

Generating queries and visualizations with AI

Since its initial release in 2015, MongoDB Compass has helped developers quickly build and debug queries and aggregations for their application code. Today, MongoDB Compass introduces an AI-powered, natural language query experience, making it even easier for developers to use MongoDB’s powerful Query API. Now generally available, this feature lets developers use natural language to generate executable MongoDB Query API syntax for everything from simple queries to sophisticated aggregations through an intelligent and guided experience. For example, a developer can input "Filter vacation rentals by location, group the remaining documents by number of bedrooms, and calculate the average nightly rental price," MongoDB Compass will suggest code to execute the stages of the aggregation pipeline.

Data visualizations are a powerful way of understanding application data, and embedding charts into user-facing applications further enhances their utility and appeal to developers. However, creating visualizations is often hampered by the need for in-depth knowledge of the dataset and proficiency in using business intelligence tools—skills that many developers may not have. Now available in public preview, we introduced an easy-to-use visualization tool with generative AI capabilities in MongoDB Atlas Charts. Using natural language prompts, developers can easily render charts and build dashboards, making visualizing data and enriching their apps simple and fast. For example, developers can input ‘Show me the list of movies released in the last year sorted by genre,’ and MongoDB Atlas Charts will gather data and quickly generate the requested visualization.

Today’s announcements underscore MongoDB’s commitment to helping developers innovate quickly and easily. For more about the MongoDB.local NYC 2024 updates, check out the product announcements page on our website.

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Welcome to MongoDB.local NYC 2024!

>> Announcement: Some features mentioned below will be deprecated on Sep. 30, 2025. Learn more . AI promises to upend how enterprises operate and reach customers … if only they could first find the "On" button. Despite the tremendous promise of AI, most companies still find themselves in the experimentation phase, working through proofs of concept, hampered by unfamiliar technologies that don't work well together. But MongoDB is uniquely positioned to help developers turn all this AI noise into "signal" that benefits customers. This post is also available in: Deutsch , Français , Español , Português , Italiano , 한국어 , 简体中文 . This week at MongoDB.local NYC, thousands of developers and executives—representing Fortune 500 companies and cutting-edge startups—have gathered to discuss and demonstrate the real-world successes they've had building on MongoDB's developer data platform. MongoDB is fast becoming the industry’s go-to memory database for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic systems, offering a unified data model across the entire AI stack. But this isn’t just a technology story, as important as that is. MongoDB also now offers essential programs and services to make AI much more accessible. In short, MongoDB is taking developers from experimentation to impact, and advancing our long-standing mission of making it easy to work with data. Demystifying AI Businesses are eager to adopt generative AI, but they don’t know where to start. The AI landscape is incredibly complex—and seems to get more so by the minute. This complexity, coupled with limited in-house AI expertise and concerns about the performance and security risks of integrating disparate technologies, is keeping too many organizations on the sidelines. MongoDB can help. To get organizations started, we’re announcing the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP) . With MAAP, we give customers the blueprints and reference architectures to easily understand how to build AI applications. We also take on the heavy lifting of integrating MongoDB's developer data platform with leading AI partners like Anthropic, Cohere, Fireworks AI, Langchain, LlamaIndex, Nomic, Anyscale, Credal.ai, and Together AI, all running on the cloud provider of your choice. MAAP will be available to customers in early access starting in July. In addition to MAAP, we’re also introducing two new professional services engagements to help you build AI-powered apps quickly, safely, and cost-effectively: An AI Strategy service that leverages experts to help customers identify the highest-impact AI opportunities and to create specific plans on how to pursue them. For customers who have already identified use cases to pursue, an AI Accelerator service that brings expert consulting—from solution design through prototyping—to enable customers to execute their AI application roadmap from idea to production. Once developers get to building AI apps, they’ll find that MongoDB allows them to speak the data “language” of AI. Our developer data platform unifies all different data types alongside your real-time operational data—including source data, vector embeddings, metadata, and generated data—and supports a broad range of use cases. Not only do we give developers the most intuitive way to work with their data, we also keep improving where they can do so. Many developers first experience MongoDB in a local environment before moving to a fully managed cloud service like MongoDB Atlas. So, I'm excited to share that we will be introducing full-text search and vector search in MongoDB Community Edition later this year, making it even easier for developers to quickly experiment with new features and streamlining end-to-end software development workflows when building AI applications. These new capabilities also enable support for customers who want to run AI-powered apps on devices or on-premises. As customers begin to mature these applications, cost becomes an important consideration. Last year, we introduced dedicated nodes for Atlas Search on AWS. Using dedicated nodes, customers can isolate their vector search workloads and scale them up or down independently from operational workloads, improving performance and ensuring high availability. By giving customers workload isolation without data isolation, they can manage resources efficiently without additional complexity. Today, we’re announcing Atlas Search nodes on all three cloud providers, which customers can configure programmatically using the Atlas CLI or our Infrastructure-as-Code integrations . Learn more about how MongoDB is the best solution to the challenges posed by the fast-moving generative AI landscape . Real-time and highly performant Though AI rightly claims center stage at MongoDB .local NYC this week, it's not the only way we're helping developers. From real-time fraud detection , to predictive maintenance , to content summarization , customers need to efficiently process large volumes of high-velocity data from multiple sources. Today, we’re also announcing the general availability of Atlas Stream Processing , the public preview of Atlas Edge Server , and improved performance of time series workloads with MongoDB 8.0. Together, these capabilities enable customers to design applications that solve virtually any business challenge. Learn more about how MongoDB powers modern application requirements . These are just a few of the things we're announcing this week. Whether you’re just dipping your toes into the world of generative AI or are well on your way, MongoDB’s developer data platform, strong and diverse network of partners, and proven industry solutions will give you a competitive edge in a fast-moving market. Please take a minute to see what we've built for you, so that you can more easily build for your customers. Enjoy the conference, and we hope to see you soon! To see more announcements and get the latest product updates, visit our What’s New page. And head to the MongoDB.local hub to see where we’re stopping along our 2024 world tour.

May 2, 2024
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Staff Engineering at MongoDB: Your Path to Making Broad Impact

Andrew Whitaker is a Senior Staff Engineer at MongoDB. His previous experience spans tiny startups to enormous organizations like AWS, where he held several different roles focusing on databases. Before joining MongoDB, he worked at a startup building optimized machine learning models in the cloud. Read on to learn more about why Andrew decided to join MongoDB in a senior-level engineering role and how his work is driving improvement within our engineering organization. Why MongoDB I have long been a fan of MongoDB’s products and services. MongoDB the database has always been a pleasure to work with – the system “brings joy” to quote a phrase. As a Python developer, I appreciate how the Python driver feels “Pythonic” in a completely natural way. The programmer interacts with the database using Python constructs: dictionaries, lists, and primitive types. By contrast, SQL databases force me to change my mental model, and the query language feels like an add-on that does not blend with the core language. As an engineer, I am always looking to expand my knowledge and grow my skills. The scope of challenges engineers face at MongoDB is what triggered my interest in the company. We obviously have people working on core databases and distributed systems. But, we also have teams dedicated to machine learning, streaming data, analytics, networking, developer tooling, drivers, and many more areas. It is very hard to get bored working at MongoDB. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the people. Overall, MongoDB’s engineering culture prioritizes intelligence, low ego, and an ability to get stuff done. CL/CI (Continuous Learning, Continuous Improvement) Working at MongoDB has provided me with opportunities for continued learning and growth. Though I do not program as much as I did earlier in my career, I have recently been exploring the Rust language. I’m excited by Rust because it avoids the tradeoffs between predictable performance and safety. My work in the search space has given me exposure to the fast moving world of AI: vector embeddings, RAG, etc. For various reasons, I think MongoDB is uniquely positioned to do well in this area. On top of this, I’m working on some initiatives that are not fully public. I can say that one focus area is improving the sharding experience for our customers. We believe MongoDB sharding is best-in-breed. Still, the process requires more manual configuration than we think is ideal: customers select the shard key, cluster type, shard count, etc. We give guidance here, but I think we can raise the bar in terms of offering a seamless experience with less “futz”. I’m also working with the search team. We believe there is a natural affinity between MongoDB’s document model and AI/ML workloads. We have some features in the works that extend this integration in new and interesting ways. I also spend a fair bit of time driving quality improvements across our suite of products. Our CTO Jim Scharf frequently refers to our “ big 4 ” goals: security, durability, availability, and performance. These goals are more important than any feature we build. I’ve been working across the company to help teams define their availability SLO/SLAs. It turns out that measuring availability is a subtle topic. For example, a naive approach of counting the percentage of failed requests can underestimate downtime because customers make fewer requests when a service is unavailable. So, the first step is to clarify the definition of availability. Finally, as a lapsed academic (in a distant life, I was a graduate student at the University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering), I’m always interested in finding ways to bridge theory and practice. I’ve been collaborating with some folks in our research team to drive improvements to our replication protocols. There are theoretical results that suggest it is impossible to simultaneously achieve low latency and strong consistency (“linearizability” in the technical jargon). However, we believe there are intermediate points in the consistency/latency spectrum that have not been fully explored. This work hasn't been made into a product yet, but stay tuned. Flexible working MongoDB is a hybrid company. Like many of our engineers, I work outside the company headquarters in New York City (I live in Seattle). I appreciate MongoDB’s approach to hybrid working and that company leadership, starting with Dev , cares about the well-being of their employees. It seems there are companies that don’t seem to trust their employees to make decisions, such as which days to come into the office, so I’m thankful for the autonomy I receive at MongoDB to work in a way that’s best for me. Remote work has its challenges, but I would say that the benefit for my work/life balance has been transformative. Final thoughts I have found MongoDB engineers demonstrate a strong mix of technical depth, pragmatism, and empathy. I have yet to find the “smart jerk” prototype that seems to exist throughout the tech industry. Overall, I have found MongoDB is open to change and growth at both the team level and the individual level. There is a willingness to evolve and improve that aligns with the company’s values and leadership principles and enables the success of our technology and people. Find out more about MongoDB culture and career opportunities by joining our talent community .

November 20, 2024