NoSQL products (and among them MongoDB) should be used to meet challenges. If you have one of the following challenges, you should consider MongoDB:
- You Expect a High Write Load MongoDB by default prefers high insert rate over transaction safety. If you need to load tons of data lines with a low business value for each one, MongoDB should fit. Don't do that with $1M transactions recording or at least in these cases do it with an extra safety.
- You need High Availability in an Unreliable Environment (Cloud and Real Life) Setting replicaSet (set of servers that act as Master-Slaves) is easy and fast. Moreover, recovery from a node (or a data center) failure is instant, safe and automatic
- You need to Grow Big (and Shard Your Data) Databases scaling is hard (a single MySQL table performance will degrade when crossing the 5-10GB per table). If you need to partition and shard your database, MongoDB has a built in easy solution for that.
- Your Data is Location Based MongoDB has built in spacial functions, so finding relevant data from specific locations is fast and accurate.
- Your Data Set is Going to be Big (starting from 1GB) and Schema is Not Stable Adding new columns to RDBMS can lock the entire database in some database, or create a major load and performance degradation in other. Usually it happens when table size is larger than 1GB (and can be major pain for a system like BillRun that is described bellow and has several TB in a single table). As MongoDB is schema-less, adding a new field, does not effect old rows (or documents) and will be instant. Other plus is that you do not need a DBA to modify your schema when application changes.
- You Don't have a DBA If you don't have a DBA, and you don't want to normalize your data and do joins, you should consider MongoDB. MongoDB is great for class persistence, as classes can be serialized to JSON and stored AS IS in MongoDB. Note: If you are expecting to go big, please notice that you will need to follow some best practices to avoid pitfalls.