I'm now officially a co-author of this book. I'm sure you've all been dying to buy it 

If so, Deal of the Day July 23: Half off my book MongoDB in Action, Second Edition. Use code dotd072314au at www.manning.com/banker2/

MongoDB excitement, part 3...

Getting ready for the first MongoDB World conference in NYC, June 2014. My presentation is ready, my book chapter underway (and of course work is as busy usual) but it helps me keep from becoming bored.. That's for sure.

Then comes some more exciting news. Genentech has won a MongoDB Innovation Award in Analytics for the work we did for the genetic analysis lab system!

What more could you ask for! My first conference talk in a number of years. My first book in a number of years. And now our second award in two years, the last one being the 2013 Bio-IT award.

It certainly has been an exciting year!

MongoDB World Part 2...

So I'm preparing for a trip to NYC to give my talk at the first MongoDB World conference, when someone contacts me from the Manning Publications Co. asking if I'm interested in writing "a chapter".... "or two" in the second edition of "MongoDB in Action".  Having been co-author of a book on Java many years ago I knew what I was getting into. But despite that, I said yes! It's a fun experience and everyone should try it at least once... or twice... or more. After all, that first book was many years ago so I had pretty much forgotten how much work it was.How I'd spent a 36 hour marathon session session completing the last few chapters for the last book. Though in fact it has been a much easier experience this time. Thanks in no small part to my excellent editor Susan Conant.

So now surprise two! I'm co-author of "MongoDB in Action, second edition", writing two chapters, one on the MongoDB aggregation framework and one on text searching - two topics that just happened to undergo major revisions in the April 2014 version 2.6 release of MongoDB. All the better to learn the new features and improvements that came with that major new release.

It's been a lot of work, but tremendously entertaining. Please buy a copy!

to be continued...

So... nothing posted for a longggggggggg time... and this post is just about MonogDB as well. But it's been an interesting last few months because of MongoDB.

First I completed a system that I'd been working on for a few months that used MongoDB to load genetic test results from different laboratory instruments.The idea is that each instrument has different data that needs to be loaded, edited, analyzed and then processed to produce results that our system can recognize as genetic test results. Namely, the sample ID and what alleles were present.

The system then uses a single standard loader program to process the results and, based on common fields it finds in the MongoDB document, loads the list of alleles found for a given tissue sample. This may sound complex or simple, depending on your background. But the short version is: we can now integrate a new laboratory instrument in much less time than previously needed thanks to MongoDB's flexible schema.

Our wonderful MongoDB Enterprise Account Executive, Mark Bloomberg, thought we had an interesting story and suggested that we submit it for a proposed talk at the first MongoDB World conference held June 2014 in NYC. "Sure.. why not I thought", never thinking they'd actually be interested. But I guess Mark knew better and they were interested. And so I was off to NYC, after preparing and fine tuning a talk on our system. That was a LOT of work, but well worth it! And with a lot of help from the professionals at MongoDB who provided invaluable feedback, as well as feedback from other friends who shall remain nameless unless she gives me permission to include her name, I developed what turned out to be a pretty decent presentation. At least I think it was pretty good, though I know I can, and will, do even better next chance I get.

To be continued...