MongoDB Explained
Databases are used every day. Your grocery store, bank, restaurant, online shopping sites, hospital, favorite clothing store, and mobile service provider, for instance, all use databases to keep track of customer, inventory, employee, and accounting information.
“A structured set of data held in a computer, especially one that is accessible in various ways.” At its most basic, a database is just a way of storing and organizing information. Ideally, it is organized in such a way that it can be easily accessed, managed, and updated.
And there’s a lot of databases out there that can suit you, we’ll name a few:
Considering your needs and requirements, you may be perfectly happy with most of these. But this time, we’ll be focusing our attention on MongoDB.
“Used by millions of developers to power the world’s most innovative products and services” — MongoDB
As you can see above, a lot of very successful, international organizations and businesses are opting to use MongoDB. At Walter Code, we opted for MongoDB a while ago, and we’re quite satisfied with what it has to offer. It would only be logical to share our opinion and some insight into what MongoDB can do!
MongoDB is an open-source document database built on a horizontal scale-out architecture. Founded in 2007, MongoDB has a worldwide following in the developer community.
MongoDB is the pioneer of NoSQL databases, which developed because there was a need for a system that supports scale or rapid development cycles which are needed for modern applications.
The “documents” in MongoDB are JSON and BSON files. Instead of storing data in tables of rows or columns like SQL databases, each row in a MongoDB database is a document described in JSON, a formatting language.
Here’s a simple JSON document describing contact information:
Some perks of using JSON are:
- It is human-readable.
- Structured and unstructured information can be stored in the same document.
- You can nest JSON to store complex data objects.
- Adding fields or leaving a field out is no problem since JSON has a flexible and dynamic schema
- Adjust and reformat the database without the help of database admins
BSON, which is basically binary JSON was also created, to increase efficiency and support more data types. Data stored in BSON can be searched and indexed, tremendously increasing performance. MongoDB made sure that these databases can be used from various programming languages, including C, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Phyton, Ruby, just to name a few.
Further still, an important perk of using MongoDB is the ease with which you can transfer to, and scale up with MongoDB. With work being distributed across many smaller computers, you can be sure to handle spikes in traffic! By comparison, most SQL databases use a scale-up architecture that is limited because it relies on creating faster and more powerful computers.
Since MongoDB is created by developers, for developers, and considering the amount of time it has been present (14 years) you are sure that they will listen to developers and their feedback!
Based on the consumer feedback from g2.com we can see some of the most valued features of MongoDB, as well as least-rated:
If you are bringing together tens or hundreds of data sources, the flexibility and power of the document model can create a unified single view in ways that other databases cannot. MongoDB has succeeded in bringing such projects to life when approaches using other databases failed.
- Integrating large amounts of diverse data: create a unified single view when dealing with hundreds of data sources.
- Describing complex data structures that evolve: document databases allow the embedding of documents to describe nested structures and easily tolerate variations in data.
- Delivering data in high-performance applications: MongoDB’s scale-out architecture can support huge numbers of transactions on humongous databases.
- Supporting hybrid and multi-cloud applications: if you have applications that need to run wherever they make sense, MongoDB supports any configuration now and in the future.
- Supporting agile development and collaboration: Data becomes like code that is friendly to developers. Collaboration and governance can take place by allowing one team to control one part of a document and another team to control another part.
We’d like to add some links for you all to further explore the advantages of MongoDB compared to “traditional” databases such as MySQL.
https://www.simform.com/mongodb-vs-mysql-databases/
https://www.mongodb.com/compare/mongodb-mysql
Based on the information we’ve stated above, we hope you can see why we’ve chosen MongoDB. The efficiency and scalability it provides put it on top of our list of databases to use. However, we’re not trying to impose any opinions, we’re here to share the knowledge and some useful tips from our own experience! As always, we are eager to hear your own thoughts on the subject, and you can hit us up on our social media, at any time!
