InfoWorld review: MongoDB

I recently had the pleasure of writing a review of MongoDB for InfoWorld. For those unfamiliar with MongoDB (or Mongo for short), it’s an “open source, schema-free document store written in C++ that boasts support for a wide array of programming languages, a SQL-like query language, and a number of intriguing features related to performance and scalability”; what’s more, it has excellent documentation and a strong community. The buttress of the community is a commercial company, dubbed 10gen, which provides additional tools and services (for a fee, obviously).

Mongo’s document-oriented nature makes a lot of sense for some domains; conversely, there are definitely scenarios where it isn’t a fit. Regardless, there are a number of benefits to Mongo including:

• Out-of-the-box scalability and availability with sharding and replica sets
• Support for wide array of programming languages via drivers
• Excellent documentation, including a number of published books
• Ad hoc queries similar to SQL
• Strong community and commercial support

On the flip side, some disadvantages to Mongo are:

• No ACID transactions
• Lack of deep security features
• BI tool integration lagging (although Jaspersoft supports Mongo)
• Queries don’t support joins between collections

For more details, check out my article dubbed “Flexing NoSQL: MongoDB in review“; moreover, you might find these other resources helpful:

• Java development 2.0: MongoDB: A NoSQL datastore with (all the right) RDBMS moves
• An introduction to MongoDB (video)
• Eliot Horowitz on MongoDB (podcast)

So what are you waiting for? Stop reading this and click a link, baby!