MongoDB University Expands Education Outreach With New Partnerships

Steve Jurczak
June 14, 2023

MongoDB is paving the way for the future of development and looking to bridge the software development skills gap through partnerships with leading online learning platforms. New partnerships with LinkedIn Learning and Coursera will make MongoDB University content widely available to new learners. And, to enable traditionally underrepresented groups to advance their skills with MongoDB, we're providing free certifications to developers through Women Who Code, MyTechDev, and Lesbians Who Tech & Allies. The new partnerships are part of the MongoDB for Academia program, which gives educators access to free MongoDB Atlas credits and certifications. We're also excited to announce new online learning courses to teach database administrators and SQL professionals the power of non-relational database technologies.

Supply, demand, and closing the skills gap

Today's tech industry faces immense demand for software engineers to create new applications, and choosing the right database technology is essential for success. It establishes the backbone and influences the speed of building, deploying, and updating an application. These newly announced initiatives will make it easier than ever for developers to quickly learn how to leverage MongoDB and use it to build and deploy successful applications within high-demand industries across the globe — rapidly closing the gap on the current software engineer shortage.

MongoDB for Academia will provide educators and students with the opportunity to hone their database development skills for free. The initiative offers more than $400,000 of MongoDB Atlas credits, free certification, access to free curriculum resources, and the GitHub Student Developer Pack, giving students around the world the opportunity to enter the workforce with relevant certifications and skills.

With the addition of MongoDB University developer courses on LinkedIn Learning, millions of people across the globe have access to an expansive range of software development skills. Offering courses in Introduction to MongoDB as well as Java, Python, C#, and Node.js, these courses have been bundled into Learning Paths, creating the perfect platform for students aiming to pass MongoDB's Associate Developer certification. This partnership between MongoDB University and LinkedIn provides a chance to upskill the knowledge base of existing and aspiring software developers. Last year, 446 million skills were added to LinkedIn profiles.

By joining forces with Coursera, MongoDB University is taking its Introduction to MongoDB course to a new level. The course will now be available to 124 million global learners through the Coursera platform. Upon completion, learners will receive an electronic and physical certificate to add to their education portfolio. With this new partnership, learners will have access to official educational materials actively developed and maintained by MongoDB experts.

For experienced SQL professionals looking to expand their skills, MongoDB University is rolling out a new online learning path: MongoDB for SQL Professionals. With this course, students will gain the knowledge and expertise they need to tackle complex non-relational databases and develop powerful, innovative applications. Since refreshing MongoDB University last November, more than 50,000 developers have taken advantage of the free, ungated courses per month with more than 600 individuals becoming certified professionals.

Normalizing diversity

MongoDB is proud to also be partnering with leading diversity and inclusion advocacy groups to make software development a more welcoming profession for underrepresented groups. Through the new partnership with Women Who Code, MongoDB seeks to certify 100 members by the end of 2023. Women Who Code is an international non-profit organization that provides programming assistance to women pursuing technology careers. MongoDB University is also partnering with Lesbians Who Tech & Allies to certify 100 members beginning in October 2023. Lesbians Who Tech & Allies is a community of LGBTQ women, non-binary, and transgender individuals in and around tech. Finally, by partnering with MyTechDev, a non-profit organization focused on empowering African students, MongoDB hopes to provide practical coding skills and specialization pathways in enterprise technologies. The initiative seeks to certify 500 people in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt over the next two years.

These exciting new partnerships are all part of our mission to empower innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data. To start learning with MongoDB University, visit learn.mongodb.com.

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New Online Archive with Performance Improvements and Enhanced Metrics

We are excited to announce several new features coming to Atlas Online Archive. With these improvements, customers will observe higher performance, be able to choose which region hosts their archival data, and have greater insight into the data stored in the archive through improved metrics. New storage engine We have optimized Online Archive through the introduction of a new storage engine that captures metadata during archival to power faster query performance. The new underlying storage service minimizes the overall data scan when querying the Online Archive. Additionally, the new storage engine delivers additional benefits in the form of storage optimizations like sorting as well as ongoing rebalancing to deliver consistent performance over time. With this feature, you will experience faster Online Archive querying performance while your overall costs are decreased when querying against the archives. Ability to choose a storage region With the new Online Archives, the users will be able to select the storage region at the time of creating an Online Archive. There will be a feature to choose one of the supported Data Federation regions from the dropdown during the creation process. In addition, we display the closest region so the users can make an informed decision about their storage region. Enhanced metrics With these new enhanced and improved metrics, we are helping customers better understand what data is in their archive such that they can connect to the appropriate endpoint for their use case and have insight into the performance of archival jobs. With these enhanced metrics, users can see a dashboard including the total # of documents in the archive and overall Archive data size (with a tooltip to explain metrics), what rate are archival jobs archiving, Min/Max Date Fields in the archive, and other statistics that are helpful and important for the users to increase the visibility of the archives. Newly created archives Note that only the newly created Online Archives on or after 06/07/2023 will see the performance improvements and enhancements initially. All existing archives created before 06/07/2023 will continue to function as-is (without the new improvements and enhanced metrics). Over the coming year, we will migrate all existing archives created before 06/07/2023 to the new backend storage service. See the documentation for additional information about creating new Online Archives and Enhanced Metrics .

June 13, 2023
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Hanabi Technologies Uses MongoDB to Power AI Assistant, Hana

For all the hype surrounding generative AI, cynics tend to view the few real-world implementations as little more than “fancy chatbots.” But for Abhinav Aggarwal, CEO of Hanabi Technologies, the idea of a generative AI-powered bot that is more than just an assistant was intriguing. “I’d been using ChatGPT since it launched,” said Aggarwal. “That got me thinking: How could we make a chatbot that was like a team member?” And with that concept, Hana was born. The problem with bots “Most generative AI chatbots do not act like people; they wait for a command and give a response,” said Aggarwal. “We wanted to create a human-like chatbot that would proactively help people based on what they wanted—automating reminders, for example, or fetching time zones from your calendar to correctly schedule meetings.” Hanabi’s flagship product, Hana, is an AI assistant designed to enhance team collaboration within Google Chat, working in concert with Google Workspace and its suite of products. “Our target customers are smaller companies of between 10 and 50 people. At this size you’re not going to build your own agent from scratch,” he said. Hana integrates with Google APIs to deliver a human-like assistant that chimes in with helpful interventions, such as automatically setting reminders and making sure meetings are booked in the right time zone for each participant. “Hana is designed to bring AI to smaller companies and help them collaborate in a space where they are already working—Google Workspace,” Aggarwal explained. The MongoDB Atlas solution For Hana to act like a member of the team, Hanabi needed to process massive amounts of data to support advanced features like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for better information retrieval across Google Docs and many other sources. And with a rapidly growing user base of over 600 organizations and 17,000+ installs, Hanabi also required a secure, scalable, and high-performing data storage solution. MongoDB Atlas provided a flexible document model, built-in vector database, and scalable cloud-based infrastructure, freeing Hanabi engineers to build new features for Hana rather than focusing on rote tasks like data extract, transform, and load processes or manual scaling and provisioning. Now, MongoDB Atlas handles a variety of responsibilities: Scalability and security: MongoDB Atlas’s auto-scaling and automatic backup features have enabled Hanabi to seamlessly grow its user base without the need for manual database management. RAG: MongoDB Atlas plays a critical role in Hana’s RAG functionality. The platform enables Hanabi to split Google Docs into small sections, create embeddings, and store these sections in Atlas’s vector database. Development Processes: According to Aggarwal, MongoDB’s flexibility in managing changing schemas has been essential to the company’s fast-paced development cycle. Data Visualization: Using MongoDB Atlas Charts has enabled Hanabi to create comprehensive dashboards for real-time data visualization. This has helped the team track usage, set reminders, and optimize performance without needing to build a manual dashboard. Impact and results With MongoDB Atlas, Hanabi can successfully scale Hana to meet the demands of its rapidly expanding user base. The integration is also enabling Hana to offer powerful features like automatic interactions with customers, advanced information retrieval from Google Docs, and manually added memory snippets, making it an essential tool for teams around the world. Next steps Hanabi plans to continue integrating more tools into Hana while expanding its reach to personal Gmail users. The company is also rolling out a new automatic-interaction feature, further enhancing Hana’s ability to proactively assist users without direct commands. MongoDB Atlas remains a key component of Hanabi’s stack, alongside Google Kubernetes Engine, NestJS, and LangChain, enabling Hanabi to focus on innovating to improve the customer experience. Tech Stack MongoDB Atlas Google Kubernetes Engine NestJS LangChain Are you building AI apps? Join the MongoDB AI Innovators Program today! Successful participants gain access to free MongoDB Atlas credits, technical enablement, and invaluable connections within the broader AI ecosystem. If your company is interested in being featured, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us at ai_adopters@mongodb.com.

November 21, 2024