Podcast 364: What’s the blast radius when your database goes down?
We chat with Mark Porter, CTO of MongoDB, about his history using and building some of the foundational databases of the last four decades. We walk through his time at Oracle and AWS, then delve into the trends he’s focused on at MongoDB, such as time series capabilities and serverless instances.
Episode Notes
Mark started out on a 4k TRS-80 Model I. He had to program it in assembly language, as there wasn’t enough memory to use the local Basic copy.
Throughout his career, he’s oscillated between using databases and building databases. He started at Caltech and NASA, using databases to store and organize space data and chip data. Then he built databases at Oracle, including versions, 5 6, 7, and 8.
After that it was back to using databases at NewsCorp for huge student data systems.
He built databases at AWS with Amazon RDS, then moved to Grab Taxi, the Uber of Southeast Asia, and finally back to MongoDB, where he is building again.
You can find Mark on Twitter here.
This week’s lifeboat badge goes to Erik Kalkoken, who answered the question: In a Slack, is there a way to see all the members that is part of that channel?
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3 Comments
Long live the TRS-80! I started with a 32kb Model III so I was just “swimming” in RAM 😉
When listening to this podcast I wondered, why would you want to allow a developer to just add a field to a dataset? This makes no sense in the data management realm. Because data, these days is an asset. An asset you need to treasure and can bring great profits. But also an asset that is subject to a lot of legislation and therefor can be a big liability. So you need to know exactly what data is saved, where it is, what you do with it and how the data is used and processed just to cover basic liabilities like GDPR and tax regulations.
Also you don’t want data items created left and right for the same data items because of these liabilities, you want to enforce reuse and content management of data items, because your data needs to be reliable for financial and logistic purposes.
Maybe someone can explain to me how this is covered if every developer can just create what data item they want, when they want? Isn’t that why databases where invented in the first place?
Just wondering, maybe someone can give guide me in the right direction?
My first time listening to a stack overflow podcast.
I’m impressed, there’s me running to get a coffee for the second half 🙂 … only 30 minutes? This could have been an hour and it would still seem like 30 mins.
Guess I’ll have to check out Mark’s recommendation if the other podcast. Great job all evolved!
For the record, I started off on a TI-99/4A and the first database I used was called Archive (on the Sinclair QL).