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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

MongoLab sponsors Node Knockout hackathon 2012

By on 2012/11/08 in events, general, partnerships


We’re fans of Node.js and so we’re happy to be sponsoring the Node Knockout 48-hour hackathon and to be providing two prizes!

We host MongoDB at JoyentCloud with 500MB free plans.  JoyentCloud is where Nodejitsu hosts Node Knockout apps.  If you select JoyentCloud’s us-east-1 (Virgina) datacenter, you’ll have a low latency connection between your Node Knockout app and your database.

Instructions on how to provision a MongoLab server on the JoyentCloud (UPDATED):

  1. “npm update -g jitsu” OR “npm install -g jitsu”
  2. “jitsu databases create mongo”

We’ll have a person on-site at Joyent’s San Francisco headquarters for the kickoff on Nov 9.  As always, we have engineers at support@mongolab.com at the ready to answer questions.

We are offering the winners of the Team category and the Innovation category each a dedicated replica-set cluster with 2 GB RAM for 6 months.  May the best apps win!

updates: 2012-11-09 clarification on prizes, official Node Knockout URL added.  Old draft URL here: https://gist.github.com/4042395.  Updated instructions.

Dex 0.5: Weighted Index Recommendations for MongoDB

By on 2012/10/09 in general

Greetings, adventurers!

I am happy to announce the latest version of Dex, MongoLab’s Index Bot. With version 0.5, we’re declaring Dex halfway-there in terms of major features. The most important and convenient improvements in this version are Weighted Index Recommendations and support for MongoDB 2.2 log files.

If you haven’t given Dex a try yet, check out the README and sudo pip install dex to get started. Even if you are already a Dex user, I highly recommend you revisit the readme, as Dex’s output has changed.

Now when you run Dex, Dex compiles statistics for its recommendations, and provides those in its output. In contrast to prior versions, this gives a weight to each suggested index, clearly identifying the worst offenders.

Here’s a rundown of major changes:

  • Weighted Recommendations – For each recommendation, Dex tallies the number of affected queries, the total time consumed by those queries, and the average time for a single query. Note that Dex keeps subtotal statistics for each unique query pattern that prompted a given recommendation. Subtotals are available in –verbose/-v mode only.
  • Output changes – We’ve modified Dex’s output for the purposes of readability and convenience, in the following ways:
    • By default (i.e., not in –watch/-w mode), Dex no longer provides runtime output. Dex reads the entire profile collection or log file and then outputs one set of full results.
    • In –watch/-w mode, Dex still provides runtime output, periodically printing all recommendations with up-to-date statistics.
    • The shell command suggestion is removed from default output in favor of concise, weighted index recommendations. The shell command is still available in –verbose/-v output, but is no longer included by default.
  • Support for MongoDB 2.2 log files – While Dex has supported MongoDB 2.2 in –profile/-p mode, updates to Dex’s log file regexes now support recent updates to the MongoDB log file line format.

For more information about Dex, check out Introducing Dex. As always, good luck out there!

Sincerely,
Eric@MongoLab

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MongoLab Discount for JS.everywhere() 2012

By on 2012/10/08 in announcement, events, general, JSON, MongoDB

MongoLab is happy to be sponsoring the JS.everywhere() conference in Silicon Valley at the end of October. If you’re interested in joining us, please use this discount code on the registration page: “mongolabJS”.  You’ll get 50% discount on attendance. We are looking forward to seeing you there.

MongoDB’s native support for JSON of course makes it a natural fit to work with Javascript.  Javascript’s growing popularity beyond browser clients is driving the need for a scalable JSON persistence layer.  Having that cloud persistence layer at MongoLab, we get to see many interesting new projects in enterprises large and small.  So we’re excited to be reaching out to meet new users.

Details on our events page:

URL: http://www.jseverywhere.org/
Registration URL: http://jse2012.eventbrite.com/
Discount Code: mongolabJS
Dates: October 26-27, 2012
Location: San Jose, CA