Recap of Product Announcements at MongoDB.local London, 2023

We’re now more than three months into our MongoDB.local world tour that kicked off in NYC earlier this June. Since then, we’ve continued to introduce product enhancements and new capabilities, from the GA of MongoDB for VS Code to MongoDB 7.0 and Queryable Encryption. Today, I’m excited to share the highlights of recent product announcements from our London conference this morning.

Efficient and intelligent developer experiences for building with MongoDB

We’ve always been committed to providing the best developer experience because we know that developer time is one of the most precious commodities in any organization. When we looked at the most common tasks developers perform on a daily basis, we recognized two areas for improvement: making development against Atlas more efficient and making it easier to write MongoDB queries.

We want to give developers the most ergonomic way to work with MongoDB Atlas throughout their entire journey. For many developers, that journey begins by working with MongoDB locally before moving to the cloud - which is why we’re investing in a great local development experience. Starting today, developers can use the Atlas CLI to manage local development environments with the same experience as Atlas clusters in the cloud.

Beyond making it easy to deploy and manage development instances, we also want to bring the breadth of our developer data platform to local environments. The new Atlas CLI experience, available in public preview, also comes with integrated Atlas Search and Atlas Vector Search so developers can create and manage search indexes and queries within their development workflows. This is the first of more investments to come as we continue to build a seamless experience for services in Atlas from sandbox to testing and production.

The other problem we want to solve is speed, and we’re excited to use generative AI technology to introduce several new intelligent developer experiences. Querying data should be as easy as asking a question in a language that feels natural to you. Developers can now ask questions in plain English and Compass, our MongoDB GUI, will generate the corresponding query in MongoDB query language syntax. From simple queries to more complex aggregations, this experience will reduce the friction of learning MongoDB’s query language and help developers iterate and build new features more quickly. We’re also introducing a new language interface for Atlas Charts so developers can easily visualize data in MongoDB and an AI chatbot for our documentation resources.

For customers embarking on a migration journey from using relational databases to using MongoDB, one of the most difficult and important steps is converting hundreds, if not thousands, of queries and application code. Available now in private preview, SQL query conversion in Relational Migrator can convert queries and stored procedures to MongoDB query language syntax at scale, shifting resources from query creation to review and implementation.

Run MongoDB anywhere - from edge to cloud

One of the benefits of MongoDB that we’ve been proud of since the beginning is the flexibility to build with it anywhere - on a local machine for development, fully managed across multiple public clouds, on-premises or in a private cloud, and even on mobile and edge devices. As mobility and IoT become more essential to operations across industries, one of the key requirements is being able to sync and move data across environments. Today, we’re excited to announce Atlas for the Edge, which brings data processing and storage capabilities closer to where it’s often most needed - right where data is generated.

With Atlas Edge Servers that can be deployed anywhere and built-in conflict resolution, customers can easily create hub and spoke architectures to power customer experiences that require ultra-low latency or heavier computation close to where data is generated. From manufacturing to retail to healthcare, Atlas for the Edge enables customers to unlock more use cases that rely on a connected data layer across public clouds, on-premise or edge computing locations, and sensors and devices.

Build the next generation of AI-powered applications with a developer data platform

Since our public preview announcement earlier this year, we’ve seen a lot of interest in Atlas Vector Search, particularly in building RAG (retrieval augmented generation) architectures for applications powered by Generative AI. From startups to established companies, customers are eager to build more intelligent applications with the backing of a modern, highly scalable, and performant platform. The ability to store vector embeddings alongside source and metadata has simplified how developers build GenAI into new and existing applications, and with the introduction of the $vectorSearch aggregation stage, it will be even easier to pre-filter and tune results using the MongoDB query language, all in a single platform on Atlas.

Finally, we recognize the need to empower developers with practical resources to expand their skills and knowledge. In addition to new content available on MongoDB University, we announced MongoDB Press, a medium for publishing technical and leadership knowledge about MongoDB. The first two books are on aggregations and mastering MongoDB 7.0. We also added a solutions library on our website with use cases organized by industry verticals to show the art of what’s possible with our developer data platform.