I just got back from the first MongoDB regional conference in San Francisco and wanted to share a few impressions. I will be blogging more about MongoDB, but here are some first impressions from the conference:

We’ve had support for MongoDB encryption key management for some months now, and the conference in San Francisco last week was a real delight. This is an amazing community of developers and users who are innovating and creating new applications based on MongoDB at a rapid pace. I was happy to give the security session on encryption key management for MongoDB and it was a great success. You can find a replay here.

I spent time talking to some of the hundreds of attendees and learned a lot about how the use MongoDB. Here are just a few take-aways:

MongoDB is Easy to Use

Database development has the reputation of being difficult and requiring extensive expertise. But I met a lot of people who have developed MongoDB databases without much or any database administrative knowledge. For example, I talked to a young scientist (that was the title on her badge) who was not in an IT group at all. She had developed a MongoDB database to store and analyze genetics information from her genome sequencing project. I met a pair of IT administrators from a property management company who had developed three applications on MongoDB because their development team had a long backlog of projects. They were in the network administration group and did not have formal experience with database development, but they built applications in a short period of time. It’s truly amazing to see sophisticated applications being developed by users!

MongoDB is Replacing Traditional Relational Databases

Before last week I thought of MongoDB as a big data repository for documents and IoT data. It is that, but it is a lot more. Many of the professionals I talked to at the conference were using MongoDB the way you would use a normal relational database like SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 or MySQL. I had the definite sense that MongoDB has found a way to bridge the worlds of relational databases and unstructured big data repositories. MongoDB users told me that the APIs and toolsets let them do almost anything they wanted to do.

MongoDB Really Scales for Big Data Needs

Well, MongoDB really is a great repository for big data. I talked to a number of larger enterprises from the San Francisco Bay Area who are storing extremely large amounts of data in MongoDB databases. Medical, IoT sensor data, financial data, customer service data and other types of data from a variety of data sources are being collected in MongoDB for business operations support and business analytics. The scalability of MongoDB is truly impressive.

Sensitive Data is Going into Almost All MongoDB Databases!!!

The other thing I learned is that an awful lot of sensitive data is being stored in MongoDB. The database is very flexible, and so there tend to be a lot of data feeds into the database. And those database feeds can include sensitive data that the MongoDB developers do not know about. I heard stories about MongoDB developers being surprised to find credit card numbers, social security numbers, email addresses, medical data and a lot of personally identifiable information (PII) being stored in the database.

MongoDB developers are really aware of the risks of sensitive data in the database. And they were hungry for information on how to protect it. Fortunately MongoDB Enterprise makes it incredibly easy to implement encryption and key management. In my session I was able to show how you can enable encryption in MongoDB with just a few commands. Customers upgrading from the open source Community Edition of MongoDB get access to this encryption facility and it is a delight.

MongoDB is Doing Encryption and Key Management Right

I’ve been impressed with the MongoDB implementation of encryption and key management from the start. First, MongoDB stepped up and implemented encryption right in the MongoDB database. There is no need for any third party file or folder encryption product to sit under the database. The encryption in MongoDB is based on industry standards (256-bit AES) and is tuned for performance. This is exactly what you want - your database vendor taking responsibility for encryption and owning the performance profile.

MongoDB also got the encryption key management part right. They based the key management interface on the open OASIS standard Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) in order to immediately support a broader community of key management vendors. That made it easier for us to certify our key management solution, Alliance Key Manager, for the MongoDB Enterprise platform. We are happy to support both Intel and POWER chip architectures for MongoDB deployments.

Lastly, just a personal note. I met a lot of MongoDB staff and managers at the conference. What a great bunch of people. They were energized and positive about what they are doing. Every company has its own character, and I found myself happy that we were engaged with this group of people.

Patrick