Switching to MongoDB: The challenges of translating database schemas

For a brand new app, your data model will grow and evolve with your app, but what if you already have data in another database that you want to transition away from?

An application that was built on a relational database will have been built with the patterns and constraints of a relational model and SQL queries. The MongoDB document model is a different way of thinking about data modeling, with a different set of advantages and limitations. Adapting an application’s data model to work well with MongoDB is a fun challenge! It needs to be done with an understanding of the data’s context and usage patterns.

This talk isn’t about whether or not you should switch to MongoDB, instead we’ll focus on the practicalities of the migration process and the challenges of transforming data from a relational world to a MongoDB document-model. As part of this we’ll see the tools we’ve built to give developers insight into their current database and provide flexibility and control over the migration process.

Katie Bell

Katie is currently working as a Staff Engineer at MongoDB, developing tools that help developers migrate data from other databases to MongoDB.

Before joining MongoDB, she spent a few years as a freelance developer and General Assembly bootcamp instructor. Her contract work covered a wide range of applications from a startup platform for selling limited-release sneakers, to an automated bidding system for renewables on the Australian energy market.

Her background in a variety of SQL and NoSQL databases comes from Campaign Monitor where she was engineering productivity lead and SRE across a SQLServer and Cassandra system, and from Google as a Software Engineer and later a Site Reliability Engineer.