Item: MongoDB
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

MongoDB is one of the main databases we use for our SaaS product. Its flexibility and ease to develop with allows our development team to quickly prototype and validate new product ideas, allowing us to bring new features to the market at a much faster speed.

Pros and Cons

Scaling and replication.
Easy to develop with.
Good support by many cloud vendors.
Good tool support, such as MongoDB Compass.

Query becomes more complex when your data starts to have relations.
The aggregation framework has a bit of learning curve.
Being schema-less can sometimes lead to bad data modeling designs.
If you need to change the name of an attribute (i.e. column name of a table for SQL), it can become tricky.

Return on Investment

Increased developer productivity.
Bring new features to market much faster.

Alternatives Considered

Couchbase

Both Couchbase and MongoDB are document-oriented NoSQL databases, so they have very similar features. While they do have some fundamental differences in terms of how they scale, shard, etc. the one key reason why we went with MongoDB is its availability and support from the cloud platform vendor we build and run our applications on.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of MongoDB go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy MongoDB again?

Yes

Other Software Used

PostgreSQL, DbVisualizer

Usability

MongoDB is surprisingly easy to use. The team is able to set it up and start working with it almost immediately. There were a few gotchas along the way, mostly when setting it up for production uses, but those were mostly minor and well covered in the documentation. The tool (Compass) provided is also very intuitive and easy to work with. Learning to run queries took a bit of time, but it is mostly due to it being new and very different from how SQL works.

Support Rating

MongoDB provides excellent support, both via a paid plan, as well as from the community, which is huge. You can usually get your questions answered by the community.

Likelihood to Recommend

If your use case does not require relation heavy data models or transactions that need to be ACID compliant, MongoDB can be a good option, especially if you are starting with a new project and need to prototype and validate your ideas quickly. Its schemaless design allows you to change your data models on the fly, which can often be the case for new projects. However, the key thing is making sure your developers can get their heads around how MongoDB works and the lack of SQL.

No data relations, go MongoDB!

Overall Satisfaction with MongoDB