MongoDB: The Developer Data Platform

What is MongoDB?

MongoDB is an open-source NoSQL database management program. NoSQL (Not only SQL) is an alternative to traditional relational databases. NoSQL databases are quite useful for working with large sets of distributed data. “Mongo DB” is a tool that can manage document-oriented information, and store or retrieve information.

Organizations use MongoDB for high-volume data storage, storing large amounts of data while ensuring fast performance. Organizations also use Mongo dB for its ad-hoc queries, indexing, load balancing, aggregation, server-side JavaScript execution, and other features.

In SQL, organizations manage a relational database as a standardized programming language. SQL normalizes data as schemas and tables; every table has a fixed structure.

Instead of using tables and rows as in relational databases, as a NoSQL database, collections and documents make up the MongoDB architecture. Key-value pairs make up documents — MongoDB’s basic unit of data. Collections, the equivalent of SQL tables, contain document sets. MongoDB offers support for many programming languages, such as C, C++, C#, Go, Java, Python, Ruby, and Swift.

How does MongoDB work?

MongoDB environments provide users with a server to create databases with Mongo DB. “Mongo DB” documents contain data and are like JSON but use BSON, which supports more data types. Document fields are analogous to database columns, and values can be any data type, including other documents, arrays, and arrays of documents. Documents have a primary key as a unique identifier and can be modified by adding or deleting fields.
MongoDB collections are like relational database tables. They can contain any type of data, but the data in a collection can’t be spread across databases. Mongo DB users can create multiple databases and collections.

The Mongodb shell is a standard component of the open-source distributions of Mongo DB. Once users install Mongo DB, they connect the Mongo shell to their running Mongo DB instances. The Mongo shell acts as an interactive JavaScript interface to Mongo DB, which allows users to query or update data and conduct administrative operations.

MongoDB uses BSON for document storage and data interchange. It also uses automatic sharding to distribute data across systems for horizontal scalability.

The NoSQL DBMS uses a single master architecture for data consistency, with secondary databases that maintain copies of the primary database. The system automatically replicates operations to those secondary databases for automatic failover.

Why is MongoDB used?

An organization might want to use MongoDB for the following:

• Storage. MongoDB can store large structured and unstructured data volumes and is scalable vertically and horizontally. Indexes improve search performance. Searches also operate by field, range, and expression queries.
• Data integration. This integrates data for applications, including hybrid and multi-cloud applications.
• Complex data structure descriptions. Document databases enable the embedding of documents to describe nested structures (a structure within a structure) and can tolerate variations in data.
• Load balancing. MongoDB can be used to run over multiple servers.

Features

Features of MongoDB include the following:

• Replication. Two or more MongoDB instances use a replica set to provide high availability. Primary and secondary servers make up replica sets. The primary MongoDB server performs all the read and write operations, while the secondary replica keeps a copy of the data. If a primary replica fails, then the system uses the secondary replica.
• Scalability. Mongo DB supports vertical and horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling works by adding more power to an existing machine, while horizontal scaling works by adding more machines to a user’s resources.
• Load balancing. Mongo DB handles load balancing without the need for a separate, dedicated load balancer, through either vertical or horizontal scaling.
• Schema-less. MongoDB is a schema-less database, which means the database can manage data without the need for a blueprint.
• Document. Mongo DB stores data in documents with key-value pairs instead of rows and columns, which makes the data more flexible when compared to SQL databases.

Advantages

MongoDB offers several potential benefits:

• Schema-less. Like other NoSQL databases, MongoDB doesn’t require predefined schemas. It stores any type of data. This gives users the flexibility to create any number of fields in a document, making it easier to scale “Mongo DB” databases compared to relational databases.
• Document-oriented. One of the advantages of using documents is that these objects map to native data types in several programming languages., Having embedded documents also reduces the need for database joins, which can lower costs.
• Scalability. A core function of “Mongo DB” is its horizontal scalability, which makes it a useful database for companies running big data applications. In addition, sharding lets the database distribute data across a cluster of machines. Mongo DB also supports the creation of zones of data based on a shared key.
• Third-party support. MongoDB supports several storage engines and provides pluggable storage engine APIs that let third parties develop their storage engines for “Mongo DB”.
• Aggregation. The DBMS also has built-in aggregation capabilities, which lets users run MapReduce code directly on the database rather than running MapReduce on Hadoop. Mongo DB also includes its own file system called GridFS, akin to the Hadoop Distributed File System. The use of the file system is primarily for storing files larger than BSON’s size limit of 16 MB per document. These similarities let Mongo DB be used instead of Hadoop, though the database software does integrate with Hadoop, Spark, and other data processing frameworks.

Disadvantages

Though there are some valuable benefits to MongoDB, there are some downsides to it as well.

• Continuity. With its automatic failover strategy, a user sets up just one master node in a Mongo DB cluster. If the master fails, another node will automatically convert to the new master. This switch promises continuity, but it isn’t instantaneous — it can take up to a minute. By comparison, the Cassandra NoSQL database supports multiple master nodes. If one master goes down, another is standing by, creating a highly available database infrastructure.
• Write limits. MongoDB’s single master node also limits how fast data can be written to the database. Data writes must be recorded on the master, and writing new information to the database is limited by the capacity of that master node.
• Data consistency. MongoDB doesn’t provide full referential integrity through the use of foreign-key constraints, which could affect data consistency.
• User authentication is not enabled by default in Mongo DB databases, which exposes them to attack. To address this, a default setting was added that blocks networked connections unless configured by an administrator.

MongoDB vs. RDBMS: What are the differences?

A relational database management system (RDBMS) is a collection of programs and capabilities that let IT teams and others create, update, administer, and otherwise interact with a relational database. RDBMSes store data in the form of tables and rows. Although it is not necessary, RDBMS most commonly uses SQL.

One of the main differences between Mongo DB and RDBMS is that RDBMS is a relational database while Mongo DB is nonrelational. Likewise, while most RDBMS systems use SQL to manage stored data, MongoDB uses BSON for data storage — a type of NoSQL database.

While RDBMS uses tables and rows, Mongo DB uses documents and collections. In RDBMS a table — the equivalent to a Mongo DB collection — stores data as columns and rows. Likewise, a row in RDBMS is the equivalent of a Mongo DB document but stores data as structured data items in a table. A column denotes sets of data values, which is equivalent to a field in Mongo DB. The MongoDB is also better suited for hierarchical storage.

MongoDB platforms

MongodB is available in the community and commercial versions through vendor Mongo DB Inc. Mongo DB Community Edition is open-sourceurce release, while MongoDB Enterprise Server brings added security features, an in-memory storage engine, administration and authentication features, and monitoring capabilities through Ops Manager.

A graphical user interface (GUI) named Mongo DB Compass gives users a way to work with document structure, conduct queries, index data, and more. The MongoDB Connector for BI lets users connect the NoSQL database to their business intelligence tools to visualize data and create reports using SQL queries.

Following in the footsteps of other NoSQL database providers, Mongo DB Inc. launched a cloud database as a service named MongoDB Atlas in 2016. Atlas runs on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Later, Mongo DB released a platform named Stitch for application development on MongoDB Atlas, with plans to extend it to on-premises databases.

The company also added support for multi-document atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) transactions as part of MongoDB 4.0 in 2018. Complying with the ACID properties across multiple documents expands the types of transactional workloads that Mongo DB can handle with guaranteed accuracy and reliability.

MongoDB history

MongoDB was created by Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, who encountered development and scalability issues with traditional relational database approaches while building web applications at DoubleClick, an online advertising company that is now owned by Google Inc. The name of the database was derived from the word humongous to represent the idea of supporting large amounts of data.

Merriman and Horowitz helped form 10Gen Inc. in 2007 to commercialize MongoDB and related software. The company was renamed MongoDB Inc. in 2013 and went public in October 2017 under the ticker symbol MDB.

The DBMS was released as open-source software in 2009 and has been kept updated since.

Organizations like the insurance company MetLife have used Mongo DB for customer service applications, while other websites like Craigslist have used it for archiving data. The CERN physics lab has used it for data aggregation and discovery. Additionally, The New York Times has used MongoDB to support a form-building application for photo submissions.

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