Mongo’s document-oriented nature makes a lot of sense for some domains; conversely, there are definitely scenarios where it isn’t a fit. Regardless, there are a number of benefits to Mongo including:

• Out-of-the-box scalability and availability with sharding and replica sets
• Support for wide array of programming languages via drivers
• Excellent documentation, including a number of published books
• Ad hoc queries similar to SQL
• Strong community and commercial support

On the flip side, some disadvantages to Mongo are:

• No ACID transactions
• Lack of deep security features
• BI tool integration lagging (although Jaspersoft supports Mongo)
• Queries don’t support joins between collections

For more details, check out my article dubbed “Flexing NoSQL: MongoDB in review“; moreover, you might find these other resources helpful:

• Java development 2.0: MongoDB: A NoSQL datastore with (all the right) RDBMS moves
• An introduction to MongoDB (video)
• Eliot Horowitz on MongoDB (podcast)

So what are you waiting for? Stop reading this and click a link, baby!

Nevertheless, while production data is hosted in the cloud, in many cases, local testing is desired and accordingly, from time to time, we replicate the state of production into local MonogDB instances. This is easily done with MongoDB’s mongorestore command. This utility can take the output of a mongodump (which, MongoHQ uses as part of their backup offering); thus, we download from S3 a backup of a particular MonogDB instance and restore that data locally as follows:

First, unzip the contents of a zipped mongodump:

$>tar xvf instance_name_628640_20111221150030.gtar

where instance_name is the name of your database. This will consequently create a directory (named after your instance, i.e. foo) containing a .bson file for each of your instances collections.

Next, to import that data to a locally running MongoDB instance, run from the root directory where you unzipped the backup from MongoHQ:

$>mongorestore -vvv instance_name

Where instance_name is the directory containing all the datastore’s .bson files. The -vvv enables verbosity, which is handy to see what’s going on, so standby for a lot of text to be printed out. This will create (or append to) an existing datastore instance (i.e. instance_name!) so if you already have an existing instance you might want to add --drop option to the mongorestore.

Don’t forget to check out Java development 2.0: MongoDB: A NoSQL datastore with (all the right) RDBMS moves well as a podcast with Eliot Horowitz, the CTO of 10gen, the company behind MongoDB.

Part of the Amazon Web Services suite, SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query the data, and return the results. By watching, you’ll learn how SimpleDB works, understand its advantages and disadvantages, and see how to create a record, query data, and delete data using the Java SDK provided by AWS.

This installment of Java development 2.0, entitled “JavaScript for Java developers“, explains why JavaScript is an important tool for the modern Java developer. The article then gets you started with the syntax you need to build first-class applications for today’s web, including JavaScript variables, types, functions, and classes.

If you’ve not listened to Dan or read his works (like Seam in Action), you are in for a real treat — Dan is one of the most high-speed, high-energy guys I know. Red Hat was smart to make him an evangelist. So listen up and find out why!

• 70% of the world’s population has a mobile phone
• over a million Android devices are activated weekly
• 1/2 of all local searches are done on a mobile device
• over 90% of mobile Internet access is social media related

Clearly, if you aren’t building mobile apps today, you will be soon.

And if you want to build Android apps as fast as people can consume them, then I recommend you check out Ruboto, a framework that leverages the power of JRuby to enable you to quickly build and deploy Android apps. As you’ll see, with the expressiveness of Ruby and the full stack nature of this Rails-like framework, you can go from idea to device in short-order.

Follow along as some hipster (hint, he’s the coolest disco dancer you read about all the time or at least right this instant) demonstrates using the Ruboto framework to rapidly build and deploy Android applications. See how to create an emulator instance, create a Ruboto project using the command line, code your app, and use a location listener for obtaining GPS information.