An afternoon with the CEO of 10gen (the MongoDB company)

Recently I had an opportunity to attend a meetup on MongoDB with the CEO of 10gen on 23^rd December 2012. It’s the company which powers the MongoDB development and support commercially. The folks at the company are the mastermind behind the database. The CEO of the company is Dwight Merriman. He’s the guy who initiated the idea and led that into something what we know today as one of the best document store type NoSQL databases.
The meetup was arranged by ThoughtWorks which in my opinion is one of the coolest and next generation company but we’ll get to that later.

The meetup didn’t have any particular agenda; it was rather more of a get together of all the MongoDB enthusiasts. There were roughly about 50-60 participants. Dwight started off the session with a small PPT which briefed everyone about 10gen. He then explained some use cases of the DB followed by the architecture. He finally discussed some real world use cases.

Sharding architecture of MongoDB

Some noteworthy points regarding the upcoming v2.4 release:

• v2.4 will contain full text search and Kerberos connectivity
• He also cleared out that document level locking is not scheduled for v2.4

We then had an interesting discussion for around 1.5 hours on various problems and issues that we were facing in each of our projects. We touched upon topics from multi availability zone deployments (Multi AZ) to consistency model and atomic transactions. He explained the eventual consistency model very elaborately and helped us understand where in the spectrum of RDBMS to Dynamo DB, MongoDB lies. It was a fun filled interactive session and we had many of our doubts cleared from the CEO himself.

Dwight Merriman with Gaurav Kumar

The few fortunate ones had a photo session with him which was later followed by tea and snacks organized by ThoughtWorks.

A lot of us including me were very inquisitive about ThoughtWorks – the company who organized all of this. We requested the folks who work there, who by the way were very cool and humble, to tell us a little something about their culture. They presented a short PPT about the company. The kind of open environment that I saw there- no cubicles or cabins everybody just sits together-was very appealing. They follow agile methodology which was also very evident from their display boards that had sticky notes posted on them indicating which tasks are being worked on and by whom. The company also is a great contributor to the open source world. The very famous Martin Fowler (ring any bells- “Refactoring”, “UML Distilled”, and “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture”) works at ThoughtWorks.

They also promised another meetup soon.