I just finished the developer and DBA tracks of the two online MongoDB on-line trainings.
The courses are excellent, providing all you need to know to start working as a developer or DBA with MongoDB.
And, uh… they’re free!
I have taken several online courses and seen a lot of tutorials. One thing that always bugs me is the sound quality, or the lack of proper guided explanations, or the luminaries that expect you to know it all (but lack basic communication skills). But this course is really well done. Also, I’ve finally realized that taking a course with actual homework and grading is way better than watching tutorials. As the course progressed, I became super-motivated to finish it with a high score.
Of course, it helps that MongoDB is such a sexy product. Just for having schemaless design in your toolkit is worth learning it. Before this course, I disregarded NoSQL as a bunch of key-store nonsense with one cool application (Hadoop). A fad, probably. Then I started the developer’s course, I created my first MongoDB-backed REST service, then my first replicated shard.
I was so wrong.
MongoDB is perfect for data warehousing but also for the early stage of any software development project. It’s the perfect tool for creating a quick prototype backed by a very powerful database engine that can grow with the final product. If you’re a developer, you will save hours by adopting MongoDB now.
I’m sure that if I sit down with an Oracle DBA, the guy would probably destroy my assessments with things like “Oracle DB has that since the 80s” or “yeah, but the MongoDB way of doing it is insecure”. But there are workarounds for improving the security and, in practical terms, there are few databases that can offer zero-to-replicated-sharding in under two minutes, as MongoDB does.
I encourage you take one of these courses and try MongoDB in your next Software Development or Business Intelligence project. It’s an opportunity to be up to date with the latest (most hyped and coolest) database technology.
You can find the courses here: http://education.mongodb.com/
A great book on MongoDB: MongoDB: The Definitive Guide
Also:
RDBMS vs. NoSQL: How do you pick?
Infographic: Migrating from SQL to MapReduce with MongoDB
