MongoDB underpins SaaS platform that drives billions of dollars in savings in healthcare...
June 07, 2017

MongoDB underpins SaaS platform that drives billions of dollars in savings in healthcare...

Jeff Sherard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MongoDB

MongoDB is the main persistent datastore for our core platform. We had the opportunity to re-architect and re-home our platform (away from traditional RDBMS) on to a modern, cloud friendly, horizontally scalable, and highly available NoSQL database.

MongoDB is used at large scale, in large volume, and high transaction environments across the entire company.
  • Schemaless - make data changes on the fly
  • Document Based (aligns closely with object-oriented programming)
  • Built in DR and HA, scalable
  • Rich query language and aggregation tools
  • MongoDB is still a maturing platform. So it's a basic datastore - but advancing quickly and rapidly adding new features.
  • Search against a large database can be slow if not indexed properly. We use a caching layer (Elastic Search) in front of MongoDB for meta-data searches and then only search against MongoDB with very selective and targeted query (i.e. using _id)
  • It's a paradigm shift for users - to switch from thinking normalized and relational to thinking in documents.
  • Open Source w/ reasonable support costs have a direct, positive impact on the ROI (we moved away from large, monolithic, locked in licensing models)
  • You do have to balance the necessary level of HA & DR with the number of servers required to scale up and scale out. Servers cost money - so DR & HR doesn't come for free (even though it's built into the architecture of MongoDB
MongoDB was the most full-featured NoSQL database we evaluated - that offered atomic transactions at a document level, built-in HA & DR, open source, robust queries, and enterprise level support.

Other platforms had specific parts of what we were looking for - MongoDB had it all.
We are committed to MongoDB as a platform and have built a strong relationship with them.
Not everything is suited to a NoSQL database - but where it is, I would 100% recommend MongoDB where it is suited to the use case.
    • unstructured / schemaless data
    • large datasets that benefit from partitioning right 'out of the box'
    • devops culture
    • high availability environments that benefit from HA and DR right 'out of the box'

And recommend an RDBMS in other cases.
    • highly structured data
    • able to be normalized
    • strong relationships exist between entities
    • static, slow growth, small datasets