We’re a group of entrepreneurs in the Seattle area who give and seek advice on running technology startups. We meet about once or twice a month.

This is targeted at founders of, employees of, or those folks interested in joining local technology companies. Be ready to talk shop, get into technical arcana, and discuss the nitty-gritties of running/working at/launching a tech startup.

Subscribe to the email list for announcements and discussion, and to make job postings. (Moderated; list membership hidden)

• Topic: Intro to MongoDB and Schema Design
• When: Tuesday April 17, 6:45-9pm.
• Where: University of Washington, Paccar Hall 390.
• Speaker: Kevin Hanson, Solutions Architect, 10gen

MongoDB - from “humongous” - is an open source, non-relational, document-oriented database. Trading off a few traditional features of databases (notably joins and transactions) in order to achieve much better performance, MongoDB is fast, scalable, and designed for web development. The goal of the MongoDB project is to bridge the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide rich queries and deep functionality)

One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don’t always apply to MongoDB. The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Understandably, this begets good questions:

• Are foreign keys permissible, or is it better to represent one-to- many relations withing a single document?
• Are join tables necessary, or is there another technique for building out many-to-many relationships?
• What level of denormalization is appropriate?
• How do my data modeling decisions affect the efficiency of updates and queries?

In this session, we’ll answer these questions and more, provide a number of data modeling rules of thumb, and discuss the tradeoffs of various data modeling strategies.

Logistics:

• When: 6:45-9pm
• Where: See location section below.
• Cost: Free; no registration.

Future Meeting Dates:

• April 17 - Intro to MongoDB and Schema Design

Interested in speaking at an upcoming event?

• Please email chuck.groom [gmail.com] and goberoi [gmail.com] with: the topic of your talk, 2-3 sentences describing the talk, and 2-3 sentences of your biography.
• Please see the speaking guidelines

FAQ

• Who comes? Usually 30-80 people show up
• How often? Meetings are once a month
• How long? 2 hours, followed by conversation over beers at a nearby pub, Big Time Brewery (info and map)
• Who may come? Open to founders and employees of technology startups, or anyone interested in becoming involved with tech startups.
• What is the agenda? Folks introduce themselves and make announcements, then our speakers present. Afterwards, we mingle over beer.

STS meetings are held at the University of Washington in Paccar Hall, the brand new Business School building. The room for the meeting changes from week to week so please check the meeting notice above (and in email on the STS list) to know exactly which room to head to.

Here's a map detailing how to get to Paccar Hall.

Parking

• Being eco-minded types, we recommend public transit if at all possible. UW is a good bus hub.
• On campus parking is $5.00. This is probably easiest and cheapest. Best lots to park at are N1, N4, and N5.
• Street lots are available off of 15th Ave NE, but costs vary unknown.
• You can find street parking in the evenings for free, but it can be limited. Your best bet is to park near NE 45th St. and 15th Ave NE.

More recent meeting have been recorded, and posted online. See videos of STS meetings

• January, 2012
• November, 2011
• August, 2011
• June, 2011
• April, 2011
• January, 2011
• November, 2010
• September, 2010
• August, 2010
• May, 2010
• Apr, 2010
• Mar, 2010
• Feb, 2010
• Jan, 2010
• Nov, 2009
• Oct, 2009
• Sept, 2009
• Aug, 2009
• July, 2009
• June, 2009
• May, 2009
• April, 2009
• Mar, 2009
• Feb, 2009
• Jan, 2009
• Dec, 2008
• Nov, 2008
• Oct, 2008
• Sept, 2008
• August, 2008
• July, 2008
• June, 2008
• May, 2008
• Apr, 2008
• Mar, 2008
• Jan, 2008
• Oct, 2007
• Nov 7, 2006
• Oct 3, 2006
• Sept 7, 2006
• Aug 1, 2006
• July 11, 2006
• June 22, 2006

We want people to continue discussing and sharing information outside the meeting times! Please read over and contribute to the public forums.

Click here for a list of other similar organizations and events.

This site is structured as a wiki so everyone can contribute. It’s all publicly editable, except for this first page.

Chuck Groom and Gaurav Oberoi, founders of Precision Polling and now Survey Monkeys