INDUSTRY USE CASES OF MONGODB

What is MongoDB?

MongoDB is one of the most popular open-source NoSQL database written in C++. As of February 2015, MongoDB is the fourth most popular database management system. It was developed by a company 10gen which is now known as MongoDB Inc.MongoDB is a document-oriented database which stores data in JSON-like documents with dynamic schema. It means you can store your records without worrying about the data structure such as the number of fields or types of fields to store values. MongoDB documents are similar to JSON objects.

NoSQL vs. SQL Databases

MongoDB is a NoSQL database. This means you do not use SQL to interact with data in the database. Instead, you use NoSQL.

The first difference to discuss is vocabulary. In SQL, we use tables. In NoSQL, we use collections. In SQL, tables consist of records/rows, in NoSQL, collections are documents.

To query MongoDB, you need to use NoSQL syntax. Here is an example of a SQL query and the corresponding NoSQL query:

The five critical differences of SQL vs NoSQL:

1. SQL databases are relational, NoSQL are non-relational.
2. SQL databases use structured query language and have a predefined schema. NoSQL databases have dynamic schemas for unstructured data.
3. SQL databases are vertically scalable, NoSQL databases are horizontally scalable.
4. SQL databases are table-based, while NoSQL databases are document, key-value, graph, or wide-column stores.
5. SQL databases are better for multi-row transactions, NoSQL is better for unstructured data like documents or JSON.

Who is Using MongoDB?

In today’s IT industry, there are large number of companies who are using MongoDB as a database service for the applications or data storage systems. As per the survey made by Siftery on MongoDB, there are around 4000+ company confirmed that they are using MongoDB as Database. Some of the key names are :

• Wordink
• Castlight Health
• IBM
• Citrix
• Twitter
• T-Mobile
• Zendesk
• Sony
• BrightRoll
• Foursquare
• HTC
• InVision
• Intercom etc

MongoDB Case Study: Wordnik

At six times the size of the Oxford English Dictionary, Wordnik helps bring words to life by showing the conversations happening around them. Because Wordnik relies on data from real-time web posts, they needed a reliable and performance-tested database solution.

In 2009, Wordnik engineers realized that their existing MySQL data store couldn’t keep pace with the user-generated content which constantly expanded the site’s dictionary. The engineers created a prototype to test MongoDB, migrating five billion records to the non-relational database in a single day. Over the course of the next month, the entire database was migrated to MongoDB under the watchful eyes of a single developer.

MongoDB now handles every site request sent to Wordnik — often over 20 million API calls per day, from millions of unique users each month. Under their previous MySQL system, Wordnik’s IT engineers frequently dealt with locked tables and outages when too much data was added at once; using MongoDB as a non-relational database solution has eliminated the problem, and the system handles bursts of as many as 50,000 words per second during busy periods without breaking a sweat.

MongoDB Limitations

Since, in the above section, we discuss mainly the advantages of MongoDB. But in spite of these benefits, MongoDB also has some limitations like :

• Since MongoDB is not as strong ACID (Atomic, Consistency, Isolation & Durability) as compare to most RDBMS systems.
• It can’t handle complex transactions
• In MongoDB, there is no provision for Stored Procedures or functions or trigger so there are no chances to implement any business logic in the database level which can be done in any RDBMS system.

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Mukul Jeveriya - Gautam Buddha University - Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India | LinkedIn