Use Cases Or Case Study Of MongoDB
What is MongoDB?
MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL database used for high volume data storage. Instead of using tables and rows as in the traditional relational databases, MongoDB makes use of collections and documents. Documents consist of key-value pairs which are the basic unit of data in MongoDB. Collections contain sets of documents and function which is the equivalent of relational database tables. MongoDB is a database which came into light around the mid-2000s.
Why Use MongoDB?
Below are the few of the reasons as to why one should start using MongoDB
- Document-oriented — Since MongoDB is a NoSQL type database, instead of having data in a relational type format, it stores the data in documents. This makes MongoDB very flexible and adaptable to real business world situation and requirements.
- Ad hoc queries — MongoDB supports searching by field, range queries, and regular expression searches. Queries can be made to return specific fields within documents.
- Indexing — Indexes can be created to improve the performance of searches within MongoDB. Any field in a MongoDB document can be indexed.
- Replication — MongoDB can provide high availability with replica sets. A replica set consists of two or more mongo DB instances. Each replica set member may act in the role of the primary or secondary replica at any time. The primary replica is the main server which interacts with the client and performs all the read/write operations. The Secondary replicas maintain a copy of the data of the primary using built-in replication. When a primary replica fails, the replica set automatically switches over to the secondary and then it becomes the primary server.
- Load balancing — MongoDB uses the concept of sharding to scale horizontally by splitting data across multiple MongoDB instances. MongoDB can run over multiple servers, balancing the load and/or duplicating data to keep the system up and running in case of hardware failure.
Company That Uses MongoDB
Aadhar
Adhar is an excellent example of real world use cases of MongoDB. In recent times, there has been some controversy revolving around CIA’s non-profit Venture Capital arm, In-Q-Tel, backing the company, which developed MongoDB. Putting aside the controversy, let’s look at the MongoDB’s role in Aadhar.
India’s Unique Identification project, aka Aadhar, is the world’s biggest biometrics database. Aadhar is in the process of capturing demographic and biometric data of over 1.2 billion residents. Aadhar has used MongoDB as one of its databases to store this huge amount of data. MongoDB was among several database products, apart from MySQL, Hadoop and HBase, originally procured for running the database search. Here, MySQL is used for storing demographic data and MongoDB is used to store images. According to techcrunch.com, MongoDB has nothing to do with the “sensitive” data.
Shutterfly
Shutterfly is a popular internet-based photo sharing and personal publishing company that manages a store of more than 6 billion images with a transaction rate of up to 10,000 operations per second. Shutterfly is one of the companies that transitioned from Oracle to MongoDB.
During the evaluation at the time of transition to MongoDB, it became apparent that a non-relational database would suit the Shutterfly’s data needs better and thereby possibly improving programmer’s productivity as well as performance and scalability.
Shutterfly considered a wide variety of alternate database systems, including Cassandra, CouchDB and BerkeleyDB, before settling on MongoDB. Shutterfly has installed MongoDB for metadata associated with uploaded photos, while for those parts of the application that require richer transactional model, like billing and account management, the traditional RDBMS is still in place.
Till now, Shutterfly is happy with its decision of transitioning to MongoDB and what Kenny Gorman (Data Architect of Shutterfly) has to say about it is, “I am a firm believer in choosing the correct tool for the job, and MongoDB was a nice fit, but not without compromises.”
MetLife
MetLife is a leading global provider of insurance, annuities and employee benefit programs. They serve about 90 million customers and hold leading market positions in the United States, Japan, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. MetLife uses MongoDB for “The Wall”, an innovative customer service application that provides a consolidated view of MetLife customers, including policy details and transactions. The Wall is designed to look and function like Facebook and has improved customer satisfaction and call centre productivity. The Wall brings together data from more than 70 legacy systems and merges it into a single record. It runs across six servers in two data centres and presently stores about 24 terabytes of data. MongoDB-based applications are part of a series of Big Data projects that MetLife is working on to transform the company and bring technology, business and customers together.
eBay
eBay is an American multinational internet consumer-to-consumer corporation, headquartered in San Jose. eBay has a number of projects running on MongoDB for search suggestions, metadata storage, cloud management and merchandizing categorization.
