Databases at Scale: A MongoDB Case Study

The talk will look at why StudyBlue decided to move away from PostgreSQL and switch to MongoDB. We will discuss the challenges our business faced and the limitations we encountered with a traditional RDBMS. Then we will cover the basic set of features provided by MongoDB and why we felt those were a good fit with our business. Next we will look at how we designed our production implementation of MongoDB and discuss the phases we employed for migrating data. In the final section, we will cover the various challenges we encountered and describe some of methods we used to overcome problems.

Sean Laurent is the Director of Operations at StudyBlue, where he is responsible for support and building their production environment to handle an ever increasing user base. As a veteran software developer, he is a passionate advocate of bridging the developer/operations boundaries. Sean is also a MongoDB evangelist and runs the local Mongo User Group in Madison, where he lives.