About benwen

I'm MongoLab's VP of Sales and Marketing. And I'm here to serve our customers' needs for MongoDB hosting in the cloud.
Author Archive | benwen

Weekend Project: Send sensor data from Arduino to MongoDB

By on 2013/03/29 in education, general, open source

mongolab-motion-layout

Arduino is an open-source electronics platform that can acknowledge and interact with its environment through a variety of sensor types.  It’s great for hardware prototyping and one-off projects.

I just got an Arduino Board from our friends at SendGrid, who also gave me a little tutorial in the art of Arduino hacking. Inspired by the tutorial and armed with this new  board, I bought a passive infared (PIR) motion sensor from my local Radio Shack. Now I was ready to play; in particular, I wanted to be able to collect that continuous stream of hardware sensor data into a MongoDB database for logging, trend analysis, system event correlation, etc.

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MongoLab at Overdriver.com

By on 2013/03/25 in announcement, general, MongoDB, partnerships

Overdriver_Logo

We’re excited to partner with Overdriver, a unique Platform-as-a-Service for gaming that is showcasing their beta service for the first time at this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC)!

This exciting partnership means that MongoLab will serve as the core data storage provider for Overdriver’s online game developer community. You can find out more right here.

By marrying dynamic cloud scaling with gaming-specific tooling for features like virtual goods and social functionality, Overdriver addresses the biggest demand issue that game studios face: bringing titles to market quickly but with little operational risk.

MongoDB naturally supports the object-oriented information model in games, capturing concepts such as user characters, possessions, game pieces, and state of play. MongoLab’s robust and performant MongoDB-as-a-Service lets Overdriver game developers give their full attention to designing compelling games.

We are fascinated by Overdriver and honored to be an inaugural partner in their ground-breaking specialized PaaS approach.

If you’re in San Francisco this week stop by their booth, #1838, at GDC and meet the Overdriver team. Also, be sure to sign up for an account at Overdriver.com. FYI, creating a new environment at Overdriver automatically creates a new MongoLab account and database.

We can’t wait to play with what you build!

MongoLab at PyCon US 2013

By on 2013/02/26 in events, general, open source

PyCon 2013

MongoLab is psyched to sponsor PyCon US 2013!  We’ll be at booth #246 during the expo days, March 15-16, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Being pragmatists, we’re fans of getting things done.  Python is often accused of letting you do just that, and you may have noticed that Python is our language of choice for our open source projects dex and mongoctl.  We also use Python to build a lot of our internal automation tools.  We’re looking forward to meeting other Pythonistas and sharing a bit about how we use MongoDB and Python together.

Hope to see you there!

Team MongoLab

DZone MongoDB Reference Card

By on 2013/02/04 in education, general, MongoDB

As developers we’re always appreciative of documentation that lets us absorb a lot of detailed information as quickly as possible. While nothing can replace a detailed reading of the core MongoDB documentation from 10gen, a few pages of pithy reminders can make operational life a lot easier.

MongoLab sponsored the recent DZone reference card for MongoDB. Here’s a little snippet below. Download the rest of it here http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/mongodb. (registration with DZone required)

Dzone Refcard screenshot-02

Thanks to Kristina Chodorow and the 10gen crew for a nice reference card and to the folks at DZone for producing it!

UPDATE 2013-02-06: added note saying that DZone requires registration

Automated Slow Query Analysis: Dex recorded presentation from MongoSV 2012

By on 2012/12/19 in education, events, general, MongoDB, partnerships

Automated Slow Query Analysis: Dex the Index Robot

On December 4th, MongoLab engineer Eric Sedor presented about “Automated Slow Query Analysis: Dex the Index Robot” at MongoSV 2012, an annual one-day conference in Silicon Valley, CA, dedicated to the open source, non-relational database MongoDB.

A well-indexed query improves performance by several orders of magnitude. The trick is to identify an ideal set of indexes for a particular use case. Even for experts, hand-crawling MongoDB log for slow queries is a laborious process. Introducing Dex: an open-source automated tool for analyzing the slow query log or system.profile collection. Dex’s primary author Eric Sedor demonstrates Dex’s usage and elaborates on indexing topics from the basic to the advanced. Includes how to pick indexes in an elegant, practical way. You learn how Dex categorizes slow queries and recommends indexes to help keep your application running smoothly. Eric is an engineer at MongoLab, cloud-hoster of MongoDB, where Dex is used daily to optimize customer indexes.

Check out the recording below and please be sure to check out 10gen’s page for the presentation which has links to Speaker Deck slides and an alternate video link.

Here’s Dex’s github page, and the latest version (0.5) announcement