Introducing the Engine Yard Data Team

The Engine Yard Data Team’s mission is to formulate and iterate the Engine Yard data storage strategy, to help customers understand and choose their data solutions, to support OSS projects that match our vision, and to strengthen our leadership in the Ruby on Rails community. Our team is composed of Ines Sombra and our amazing DBAs: Erik Jones, Tyler Poland, and John Dalton.

We want to ensure that when you choose Engine Yard as your platform provider you have access to interesting data stores, features, tools, and information to build robust and scalable solutions. ###Our Goals

• Simplify and hide the complexities associated with data repositories.
• Choose the best-in-class technologies and publish our own best practices.
• Work closely with our customers and developers to understand their use cases and usage patterns.
• Routinely assess how closely our data products and support match our customers needs.
• Ensure Engine Yard's data repositories are up-to-date with the rapidly evolving storage technology landscape.
• Establish partnerships with key data providers to offer our customers additional services.
• Design and support multi-site disaster recovery and business continuity plans for each type of data store by working with our customers to understand their scaling needs.

###What we are currently working on

Upgrading our MySQL implementation

The team is currently working at a rapid pace to upgrade MySQL to version 5.1 and 5.5. We’ll also be improving MySQL replication, monitoring, backup, and fail-over tools.

Expanding the DB stack

We are working hard on expanding our stack to offer interesting NoSQL data stores, caches, and full-text search solutions. The products we are working on at the moment are:

__PostgreSQL 9__ PostgreSQL 9 is now in Alpha (click [here](http://docs.engineyard.com/signup-postgresql.html) for access). We are currently working towards a public Beta for all our customers to try. Postgres extensions will be available as part of the Beta release.

__MongoDB__ We are working towards an Alpha release of MongoDB. We have been collaborating with customers that are interested in this technology to further develop our tools and finalize our supported architecture. We have established critical partnerships with hosted MongoDB providers ([MongoHQ](https://mongohq.com) and [MongoLab](https://mongolab.com)), and are working with [10gen](http://www.10gen.com/) to provide additional support options for our customers. #### Redefining environments and data stores relationships We are changing the way environments interact with data stores to provide greater flexibility and configuration options. We aim to support zero to multiple data stores in the same environment to facilitate the creation of polyglot systems in our platform. #### Improving our data documentation We are collaborating with the PANDAs and our Documentation team to restructure and augment our data documentation. Watch for changes in [docs.engineyard.com](http://docs.engineyard.com/) and let us know if we are not covering something that you are interested in. ###We want to hear from you! We are actively evaluating customer requested features and we will keep you informed as our work grows from ideas to projects. Our intention is to create a strong collaborative process with our customer community, so let us know what you need. We'd love to hear your feedback! Please drop us a note at: [docs.engineyard.com/data-feedback.html](http://docs.engineyard.com/data-feedback.html) ###Want to work with us? Are you passionate about data? [We are hiring](http://www.engineyard.com/company/careers/open-positions)!