By Andrew C. Oliver, Columnist, InfoWorld |

An intro to Studio 3T, a MongoDB IDE

The growing third-party market is a key indication that MongoDB has moved from mere maturity to one of the dominant players in this market

A good indication of whether a technology is in the plateau of productivity in Gartner’s hype cycle is when someone asks ”Is MongoDB dead?” on that bastion of, um, sane discussion, Quora. A second good indication is when there are productivity tools and at least a nascent third-party market around your technology. A third indication is when a third party creates an IDE for it: The growing third-party market is a key indication that MongoDB has moved from mere maturity to one of the dominant players in this market.

Enter Studio 3T, a small European firm with its own sea mammal mascot and a reputation for being “the MongoDB GUI.” Its eponymous product is the successor to its MongoDB Chef. According to Studio 3T marketing chief Richard Collins, the company direction is as a full-fledged IDE for MongoDB.

Studio 3T lets team collaborate on MongoDB development and administration activities across roles and skill levels, from the developer to the analyst to the DBA. Studio 3T also lets these users use the technologies they’re more comfortable with, whether it be visual query building, MongoDB queries, or the inevitable SQL.

With that said, Studio 3T is not a full-fledged BI tool. (SlamData, an InfoWorld Bossies award winner, is a better tool for that purpose.)

studio 3t sql query — Studio 3T’s SQL-query UI.

studio 3t sql query with query code — Studio 3T’s code-generation UI.

As you would expect, Studio 3T’s product lets you query MongoDB in several ways: with a visual query builder, using the MongoDB query language, and using SQL. You can edit the values in place and generate code using any of these methods.

Studio 3T fills out code-generation part of the feature set with a MongoDB console with auto-complete.

If you’re looking for a more modern answer to Toad for MongoDB, Studio 3T might be your Huckleberry. Studio 3T provides tools for Schema exploration and comparison. It also provides similar functionality for data comparison. That means it can look at two different instances, such as dev and prod, and determine the answer to that age old question “What’s the difference?”

studio 3t schema explorer — Schema exploration in Studio 3T.

studio 3t data compare and sync — Schema comparison in Studio 3T.

For administrators, Studio 3T offers operations monitoring charts.

studio 3t real server operations charts customized — An operations-monitoring chart in Studio 3T.

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Andrew C. Oliver is a columnist and software developer with a long history in open source, databases, and cloud computing. He founded Apache POI and served on the board of the Open Source Initiative. Oliver has helped with marketing in startups including JBoss, Lucidworks, and Couchbase. He advises startups on marketing, growth, and outreach.