MongoDB Inc. is steering toward a future where AI-driven applications reshape the tech landscape. With a keen focus on legacy modernization, the company is enhancing performance and partnering with major cloud providers to empower developers with intelligent data tools, setting the stage for the next evolution in data technology.

The recent MongoDB.local NYC event saw a plethora of different announcements across companies and partnerships, strengthening the bond the company has with its partners and expanding its database ecosystem even further, assisting businesses with their AI journey in return.

“We also have been working closely with our partners, like AWS, Azure, and now even Google on training their large foundational models to be really good at recommending quality MongoDB code,” said Sahir Azam (pictured), chief product officer of MongoDB. “We’ve actually taken some of those models and implemented them in our own developer tools to make our own developer ecosystem more productive. There’s a variety of things that we’re doing, even legacy modernization, so helping AI assist people in getting off of old applications that they want to modernize, get onto a more modern technology like MongoDB.”

MongoDB’s Sahir Azam discusses how MongoDB is helping its partners harness the power of generative AI.

Azam spoke with theCUBE Research’s chief analyst Dave Vellante at the MongoDB.local NYC event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how MongoDB helps organizations embrace its technology, how the company is helping its partners harness the power of generative AI and about MongoDB Atlas, its core product. (* Disclosure below.)

Times are changing, and so is software development

MongoDB’s Atlas, a cloud database, allows developers to deploy, manage, scale and maintain deployments on cloud services of their choice with ease. This platform is a crown jewel of MongoDB, accounting for two-thirds of the business, according to Azam.

“On the Atlas side, specifically, there are certain capabilities, newer products that are basically architect in a cloud-native way and therefore really only in Atlas,” he said. “Things like stream processing, the expansion of that capability, getting it to GA some of the new feature announcements that we saw there.”

A big portion of the ecosystem will always have relational databases, because a lot of modern programming languages are object-oriented. In a relational database paradigm, the data model of rows and tables in a database was built when the industry was optimizing for expensive hardware, according to Azam. Now, 30 years later, prices are finally starting to come down, prompting a financial shakeup in the industry.

This has led to the cost of infrastructure no longer being a constraint, only the cost and time of developers. Realizing the financial constraints were changing, the founders of MongoDB asked themselves, “How do we persist data in a way that’s much more natural for developers?” Azam explained.

“That means that now object-oriented programming languages, developers working with formats of data like JSON, which is like the lingua franca of the modern internet, are much more natural in terms of how you store that in this document-oriented structure,” he said. “That really frees developers to just move extremely quickly. We also can do things like schema adjustments, schema migrations without having to take the database down in an always-on digital experience world. That’s really important.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the MongoDB.local NYC event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the MongoDB.local NYC event. Neither MongoDB Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE