The recent MongoDB conferences in London & Paris were very well organized, and also useful in a practical way. The 10gen founders were there, so we could discuss issues/challenges, and hear future development plans first-hand. Plus there were lots of interesting talks, covering tons of topics, including case studies by other folks using MongoDB, showing different use scenarios.

Both conferences were very good as a refresher course on Mongo’s features. We discovered cool things we assumed Mongo wasn’t doing because previous versions weren’t (but are now!), and also new things we never even dreamt Mongo could do. The most interesting highlights for us were:

• The official sharding features, planned to launch in version 1.6 of MongoDB this July will finally allow us to trash our ops scripts.
• It was good to see how labs use MongoDB for their academic research. It shows different document designs to what we’re used to in the industry.
• The talk about administration tools by Mathias Stearn was a good reminder that MongoDB admin commands return a lot of useful numbers.
• And finally, a Personal Message: Eliot, you should speak slower in front of an international audience

For those of you who missed it, we’ve posted our slides on Slideshare: One Year with MongoDB at Silentale. Other shared presentations we’ve found include:

• MongoDB Schema Design, and Approaching 1 Billion Documents in MongoDB are included in a great blogpost summary about the event, plus a Twitter list of attendees, by @UKD1 (UK)
• PHP Development and other stuff by @boxedice (UK)
• MongoDB and Research by @jandot (UK)
• MongoDB Full Text Search With Sphinx by @pierrefar (UK)
• MongoKit by @namlook (FR)
• De SQL à MongoDB l’exemple du Oupsnow by @shingara (FR)
• Sharding with MongoDB by @eliothorowitz (FR)
• Replication & Replica Sets video and slides by @dmerr (FR)
• MongoDB Schemas: Data as Documents by @hwaet (FR)
• Ruby et MongoDB, “dans la practique” by @yannski (FR)

Let us know if there’s any others out there that we missed, and we’ll add ‘em to the list!

Join Nicolas and myself at MongoUK or MongoFR conferences on June 18 and June 21, and see how MongoDB plays a key role on how to handle the massive amount of data we’re storing for our users, how we’ve built a search engine on top and which are the challenges we’ve been facing. And use the discount code ’silentale’ during registration to get 20% off.

We’re really excited to participate to the first MongoDB-related events in Europe and are looking forward to meeting you in London and Paris!