Item: MongoDB
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use MongoDB in one of our major user facing applications designed to showcase the results and analysis of students' assessments. This portal is very complex and contains various views of similar data across different dimensions. MongoDB is used as the underlying DB to help us store and retrieve the myriad data ingested via different sources for our B2B reporting. It addresses one of the major issues of non-relational, async, hierarchical data structure of our streaming data source.

We also use it for few of our other business facing apps as well. They are all independent custom built apps using different front-end technologies.

Pros and Cons

Extremely fast reads and writes if using the right indexes
Built-in aggregation function for on-demand computations
Ability to use any cloud provider for implementation. Even their own Atlas service is pretty good and affordable.

If installing it on-prep or on your own account in a public cloud, it can be a daunting experience.
Their aggregation functions still have room for improvement.
Native operational reporting functionality is a bit quirky and you have to pay for it separately. This should come built in and free.

Return on Investment

MongoDB has helped us to save costs by avoiding installing and maintaining the software in-house. We use their Atlas service and thus have freed the need for DBAs.
Migrations are difficult to perform in a reliable manner. On the flip side, they do offer this as a service now.
Lowered development times

Alternatives Considered

Cassandra and Apache Hive

We selected MongoDB because of the following

Ease of deployment
Use and provisioning on their cloud
Simple learning path for creating and building an app without much fuss about syntaxes
Beautiful graphical interface for quick setup
Cost to use and implement is very beneficial for small and midsize projects
On-demand scalability and performance improvement
Good support model and functionalities

Other Software Used

SQL Server Integration Services, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration, JIRA Software

Likelihood to Renew

Been quite happy with the product overall and has helped us run our apps efficiently.
Our expenses have been predictable.
Their support is good as well
Higher security for the price we pay

Likelihood to Recommend

This product is well suited if your need is to use a fast distributed DB with semi structured data and your semantics are not well predefined. It's also useful for building apps requiring real-time responses and fast deployment with ease of maintenance.
I wouldn't recommend you use it for any scenarios where it's beneficial to normalize the data.

MongoDB - Best DocumentDB out there !

Overall Satisfaction with MongoDB