MongoDB Review
February 23, 2019
MongoDB Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MongoDB
MongoDB is a NoSQL backend storage database that we use extensively for modeling non-relational data. NoSQL databases tend to shine when defined schemas do not well suit a data set β perhaps the dataset is highly variable in the data that it holds from one entity to another, or perhaps the data's structure is simply not well understood. NoSQL and MongoDB are great for this situation.
- Simplifies modeling complex, non-relational datasets.
- Strong open source community.
- Has solid libraries in a variety of implementation frameworks β e.g. Node JS and Mongoose.
- Documentation is at times overly difficult to understand.
- Versioning became confusing between major versions 3 and 4, with many still working on and implementing 4.
- Lacks some of the nice-to-have features of more mature, generally relational databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL.
- Simplifies the modeling efforts of variable datasets with unstructured data needing storage.
- Often requires another database, generally Elastic Search, for anything but the easiest relationship queries.
We tend to choose MongoDB when we're faced with a particular situation: we know that we need a NoSQL database in general, and want an open-source implementation that allows us to prevent against platform lock-in. Amazon's new DocumentDB product even allows us to choose to use MongoDB's tooling and community, even in cases where we are not explicitly implementing MongoDB!