Item: MongoDB
Rating: 8
Author: Jose Manuel Ortega

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use MongoDB as the main storage technology at the backend level for projects related to web development using the MEAN Stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS).

From a business point of view, the best features it provides are scalability and unstructured document storage, which allows us to have a flexible schema for the data.

Pros and Cons

Load balancing and data replication
Indexing and Document validation
Support for different programming languages and integration with different frameworks
Good query performance

Not the best solution for applications with complex transactions and many parallel operations
It is not an optimal solution if the application needs to update the database frequently.
Usually requires more disk space

Return on Investment

We can make more open and flexible systems due to its easy adaptation to new evolutions in web applications.
In the latest versions it offers support for different transactions and we could carry out real tests related to the concurrency of the application.
MongoDB allows you to have distributed clusters, which improves the speed of the queries by reducing the latency that exists between the database cluster and the service that executes the query.

Alternatives Considered

Percona Server for MongoDB, MySQL and Elasticsearch

MongoDB is more of a general purpose nosql database, while Elasticsearch is a search engine oriented nosql solution.

Percona Server for MongoDB is a more suitable solution for the enterprise field.

The choice of MongoDB as the main database is mainly due to the ease of installation and integration with other development languages and frameworks.

Key Insights

Do you think MongoDB delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with MongoDB's feature set?

Yes

Did MongoDB live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of MongoDB go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy MongoDB again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Elasticsearch, MySQL, Percona Server for MongoDB

NoSQL database systems such as MongoDB lack graphical interfaces by default and therefore to improve usability it is necessary to install third-party applications to see more visually the schemas and stored documents. In addition, these tools also allow us to visualize the commands to be executed for each operation.

Support Rating

In general, the documentation is good and the support team usually responds to questions fairly quickly, as well as a strong community that often shares a lot of knowledge in the form of articles and webinars.

Likelihood to Recommend

As a developer, the main reason for using MongoDB is its speed and its ability to add records with different fields to the same collection in a much more flexible way than a database based on a relational model. For example, a document can be used to represent a blog and the associated comments can be placed as an array in the main document. This makes data easier to manage, eliminating the "JOIN" operation that affects performance and horizontal scalability in traditional relational databases.

As for less favorable scenarios, they could be those applications that need to perform frequent updates with many transactions, for example bank transactions.

One of the best nosql databases for web applications

Overall Satisfaction with MongoDB