logo
episode-header-image
Mar 2023
26m 8s

Moving up a level of abstraction with se...

The Stack Overflow Podcast
About this episode

The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. 

Episode notes

Try MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.

You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace

If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups

The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. 

If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University

Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.

Up next
Today
There is no golden path anymore: Engineering practices are being rewritten
In this episode of Leaders of Code, Ben Matthews, Senior Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow, and Loïc Houssier, CTO at Superhuman, dive into how engineering teams can navigate paradigm shifts in a world of constant technological change. They discuss the importance of leade ... Show More
36m 43s
Jul 8
Attention isn’t all we need; we need ownership too
NEAR is the blockchain for AI, enabling AI agents to transact freely across networks.Connect with Illia on LinkedIn and X, and read the original Transformers paper that Illia co-authored in 2017.Today’s shoutout goes to Populous badge winner Adi Lester for answering the question ... Show More
36m 32s
Jul 4
Why call one API when you can use GraphQL to call them all?
Apollo GraphQL lets you orchestrate APIs with a composable, declarative, self-service model. Apollo's MCP Server is now available.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.Today we’re shouting out a Famous Question badge winner, user jkfe, for their question How to hide/show thymeleaf fields ... Show More
25m 45s
Recommended Episodes
Dec 2022
MongoDB Internal Architecture | The Backend Engineering Show
I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to compare different DBMS objectively. For example, How documents are stored in MongoDB is no different from how MySQL or PostgreSQL store rows. Every ... Show More
44m 13s
Nov 2021
MongoDB: The Database Platform - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 33]
I’m Jesse Pujji and today we’re breaking down MongoDB. The MongoDB story traces back to 2007 when the founding team was running DoubleClick, a large adtech business now owned by Google. They could not find an existing database software with the agility and scalability that the in ... Show More
45m 8s
Feb 2024
The Internals of MongoDB
https://backend.win https://databases.win I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to compare different DBMS objectively. For example, How documents are stored in MongoDB is no different from ... Show More
44m 57s
May 2023
2x Faster Reads and Writes with this MongoDB feature | Clustered Collections
Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://database.husseinnasser.com In version 5.3, MongoDB introduced a feature called clustered collection which stores documents in the _id index as oppose to the hidden wiredTiger hidden in ... Show More
27m 1s
Oct 2022
Going From Transactional To Analytical And Self-managed To Cloud On One Database With MariaDB
Summary The database market has seen unprecedented activity in recent years, with new options addressing a variety of needs being introduced on a nearly constant basis. Despite that, there are a handful of databases that continue to be adopted due to their proven reliability and ... Show More
52m 4s
Jun 2021
Accelerating ML Training And Delivery With In-Database Machine Learning
Summary When you build a machine learning model, the first step is always to load your data. Typically this means downloading files from object storage, or querying a database. To speed up the process, why not build the model inside the database so that you don’t have to move the ... Show More
1h 5m
Jun 2021
A Candid Exploration Of Timeseries Data Analysis With InfluxDB
Summary While the overall concept of timeseries data is uniform, its usage and applications are far from it. One of the most demanding applications of timeseries data is for application and server monitoring due to the problem of high cardinality. In his quest to build a generali ... Show More
1h 6m
Jul 2021
Exploring The Design And Benefits Of The Modern Data Stack
Summary We have been building platforms and workflows to store, process, and analyze data since the earliest days of computing. Over that time there have been countless architectures, patterns, and "best practices" to make that task manageable. With the growing popularity of clou ... Show More
49m 2s
Nov 2022
Analyze Massive Data At Interactive Speeds With The Power Of Bitmaps Using FeatureBase
Summary The most expensive part of working with massive data sets is the work of retrieving and processing the files that contain the raw information. FeatureBase (formerly Pilosa) avoids that overhead by converting the data into bitmaps. In this episode Matt Jaffee explains how ... Show More
59m 25s
Aug 2022
Collecting And Retaining Contextual Metadata For Powerful And Effective Data Discovery
Summary Data is useless if it isn’t being used, and you can’t use it if you don’t know where it is. Data catalogs were the first solution to this problem, but they are only helpful if you know what you are looking for. In this episode Shinji Kim discusses the challenges of data d ... Show More
53m 24s