MongoDB Day Austin: the details

MongoDB Day is the first event in the GeekAustin Data Series.
MongoDB Day is hosted by GeekAustin, and sponsored by 10gen.
MongoDB Day will be held on Saturday, March 27, 2010.
You can register for MongoDB Day at:
http://mongodbday.eventbrite.com/

What is mongoDB? Who uses mongoDB? Why should I use mongoDB? What is the format of MongoDB Day? Who are the featured presenters? Where will MongoDB Day be held?

What is mongoDB?
MongoDB (wikipedia) is an open source, high performance, schema free, scalable, document-oriented database sponsored by 10gen. If you enjoy podcasts, there is a great interview with one of Mongo's developers, Michael Dirolf, on Leo Laporte's FLOSS Weekly.

Who uses mongoDB?
MongoDB is currently deployed on production sites by companies such as Source Forge, New York Times, GitHub, and Electronic Arts. For a more extensive and descriptive list, visit the production deployments page at MongoDB.

Why should I use mongoDB?
Quoting, David Strauss, of Four Kitchens:
MongoDB is unique in that they've spent an enormous effort on their project to provide high quality access libraries for multiple languages. Most of the other NoSQL solutions are almost entirely focused on the backend while treating access libraries as an afterthought, at least for client languages other than their preferred one.

One of the most exciting things for me has been how fast I could get MongoDB running and interface with it from PHP. I installed the extension and started running MongoDB from the shell. You simply say "Mondodb [space]" and provide an argument to specify the data directory, and you have MongoDB running. There's no other configuration, and if you have the extension running for PHP, you can connect to localhost as the default.

If you're running as localhost, there's no configuration whatsoever on the PHP side. You just create a MongoDB connection. Because your databases and collections -- collections are like the equivalent of tables in MongoDB -- are created on demand as you write to them, there's no schema to load in. There's no setup to do. You simply start writing your data. You say "I want to write to this database, this collection, write out this data structure." You can instantly start writing php objects to it, reading them and finding them. It's so amazingly easy.

It took me half a day to go from not touching MongoDB to writing some fairly good functionality against it. It makes setting up, configuring, and interfacing with MySQL look archaic -- ridiculously archaic.

The folks at 10gen have done an amazing job. They've made the experience of using MongoDB so easy and pleasant. When it comes to raw performance for reading and writing to the system and making it a practical to use system, I consider them absolutely the leader right now.

What will be the format of MongoDB Day?
MongoDB Day will be a mix of formal presentations and informal Barcamp / BOF discussions. We will have both introductory sessions, as well as advanced discussions on topics such as sharding and MapReduce. There will also be a hands-on hackerspace to play with MongoDB.

Who will be the featured presenters?

David Timothy Strauss (@davidstrauss), (Four Kitchens/The Economist)
Four Kitchens co-founder David Strauss has gained world-class Drupal, PHP, and general web architecture experience from his work with the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, The Economist, Mansueto Ventures, Lifetime TV, NBC-Universal, and the Internet Archive. David is well-known in the Drupal community as an expert in scalability and database optimization and is a member of the Drupal.org Infrastructure Team. David has been developing tools using MongoDB and Cassandra to improve the performance and scalability of Drupal 7.

Mathias Stearn (@mathias_mongo) (10gen)
Mathias Stearn is a Software Engineer for 10gen, where he works on the core MongoDB server and maintains the C language driver. Previously, he worked at FactSet where he used MongoDB in a log analysis application. He has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. Check out Mathias' presentation at NoSQL Berlin

Károly Négyesi (@chx1975)
Károly Négyesi, better known in Drupal circles as chx, has been a core Drupal developer since 2004 and developer team lead of NowPublic. He currently maintains (and written significant parts of) the Drupal form API subsystem and the menu subsytem. The community sometimes accuses him of not sleeping to which he answered "I code core to be high without resorting to harmful drugs". Thus the community thinks he can not be distracted and runs http://chxcannotbedistracted.com which he finds very amusing.

Hayes Davis (@hayesdavis)
Hayes is the co-founder and CEO of Appozite, a company integrating ecommerce and social software. Appozite runs both CheapTweet.com, a search engine for deals shared on Twitter, and TweetReach.com, which provides dead simple Twitter measurement. In recent months, MongoDB has become an important part of both of these applications.

Where will MongoDB Day be held?
MongoDB Day will be held at North Austin's first coworking facility - Cospace.

Cospace
911 West Anderson Lane #203
Austin, Tx, 78757 (directions

Register at: http://mongodbday.eventbrite.com/
Please be aware that, once the event fills up, we will not accept walk-up attendees.