MongoDB Use-Case

Abhishek Anand
6 min readSep 26, 2021

MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is built on a scale-out architecture that has become popular with developers of all kinds for developing scalable applications with evolving data schemas. As a document database, MongoDB makes it easy for developers to store structured or unstructured data. It uses a JSON-like format to store documents.

Some Real-World Companies That Use MongoDB

1. eBay

eBay is a multinational company that provides a platform for the customer to customer sales. It is currently running a large number of projects in MongoDB like merchandising categorization, cloud management, metadata storage, search suggestions.

2. MetLife

MetLife is a leading company in employee benefit programs, annuities, and insurance. There are more than 90 million customers in the Middle East, Europe, Aisa, Latin America, Japan, United States. MetLife is using MongoDB for its advanced customer service application called The Wall.

This application provides a combined view of transactions, policy details, and other details of MetLife Customers. It looks like Wall of Facebook, which takes data from 70 legacy systems and merges it into a single record. It stores 24 Terabytes of data and runs across six servers in two data centers. MetLife is working on a series of Big Data projects where MongoDB-based applications are part of it.

3. Shutterfly

Shutterfly is one of the most popular online photo sharing, and it is using MongoDB to manage and store more than 6 billion images, which has a transaction rate of up to 10,000 operations per second. Shutterfly earlier used Oracle but later transitioned to MongoDB.

Shutterfly company realized that moving to a non-relational database will help them to increase their scalability, performance, and productivity of the programmer.

Shutterfly did consider many other alternate database systems like BerkeleyDB, CouchDB, or Cassandra. The company has confirmed that they are pleased with their decision of transitioning from Oracle to MongoDB.

4. Aadhar

It is India’s Unique Identification project, which has the biggest biometrics database in the world. Aadhar Project is using MongoDB as its database to store a massive amount of demographic and biometric data of more than 1.2 billion Indians. MongoDB is being used for the storage of images in the Aadhar project.

5. EA

Ea is an online multiplayer game that is using MongoDB Database for its game called FIFA Online 3. MongoDB can easily handle complicated things that need synchronization with each other entirely.

Practical MongoDB Use Cases

Some documents are called MongoDB Use Case documents, which will help in introducing the operations used, designs, and patterns in MongoDB application development. Data Modeling Strategies and Application Design will be highlighted in these documents.

It will also give some special attention to scaling, sharding, performance, and indexing. Three case studies will be described, which are: content management case studies, product data management case studies, and operational intelligence case studies.

1. Content Management Systems

Fundamental of MongoDB approaches and practices are introduced in content management use cases, which would be done using familiar, simple examples and problems. The method for modeling user comments on content like media and blog spots are introduced by “Storing Comments”. A model is proposed for designing a website content management system by “Metadata and Asset Management” in MongoDB. Hadoop Vs MongoDB

2. Product Data Management

For e-commerce websites and product data management and solutions, one can use MongoDB to store information because it has the flexible schema well suited for the job. One can also manage a product catalog and learn the practices and methods for modeling from the Product Catalog document.

They can also determine the pattern to handle interactions between user’s shopping carts and inventory using “Inventory Management.” MongoDB also has a report called “Category Hierarchy,” which will describe the techniques to do interaction with category hierarchies in MongoDB.

3. Operational Intelligence

MongoDB is beneficial for real-time analytics and operational intelligence use. One can learn “Storing Log Data” Document to know about the approaches and several ways to store and model machine-generated data with MongoDB. They can also determine the Hierarchical Aggregation Method to store and process hierarchical reports from raw event data according to the minute, hour, or day.

Top MongoDB Usage

1. Mobility and Scaling

MongoDB is very scalable and flexible, which gives fantastic database solutions to deal with different kinds of environments. The schemas of MongoDB will evolve over time, and in this way, mobile application developers can focus their time on developing better customer experience. This will help many companies to deal with varying structures of data that are coming from many different sources in the mobile application development world.

2. Real-Time Data Integration

There is a lot of value to data if it is consolidated and aggregated into one single view, and MongoDB plays a vital role in doing that. Due to the query capabilities and flexibility of MongoDB, now it is easier to aggregate data and create those tools which will make an organization more efficient.

With the help of MongoDB, one can see aggregated data in a single view in real-time, which provides massive value to the companies. A developer can also take quick action on specific events and also monitor with the help of MongoDB 3.6.

3. Product Catalog

There are many attributes to products which are easily stored as an object using MongoDB and can be used to understand the customer better in the digital experience. Nowadays, the quality and volume of data are increasing and are being used to improve the interaction in product catalogs of customers. MongoDB has dynamic schema capability, which helps in bringing relevancy between attributes and product documents. It will provide a better experience for both customers and developers.

MongoDB Applications

There are many MongoDB applications, and here they are:

1. Balanced Features

One can use MongoDB to get multiple balanced features. For example, that one wants to use some features like Queuing, Map/Reduce, FTS but don’t require it a lot, which is easily possible through MongoDB.

2. Consistency over Availability

If one prefers consistency over availability, then he can get a specific version of Consistency in MongoDB applications.

3. Denormalizing the Data

Re-denormalizing the data is tough to do and also very expensive. Also, you will not be able to change the shard keys when you are running MongoDB.

The mix of Secondary indexes and Key/Value lookups

If you want to use a blend of secondary indexes and key/value lookups, then you can use MongoDB. But you cannot use it for too many secondary indexes because it will start scaling poorly.

4. Data on Single Server

One of the best features of MongoDB is that it was made intentionally sub-optimal to enable sharding on a single server. But you can use PostgreSQl, If the data fits on a single server comfortably.

5. Ideal for Querying

If the rate of querying is very strong to the database, then Mongo is ideal to be used because it resembles a DWH cube in its basic data structure.

6. Ideal for Documented-oriented

MongoDB is the right choice only when there are few relations, and one wants to scale it. It might not be suitable to use when there are too many relations, such as a social network. But it can be amazing to see as to how it will handle the document-oriented store. MongoDB is ideal for storing loads of documents that can be sorted by a tag or category.

7. Polyglot Database System

MongoDB has an excellent capability to pick up the best part of all the databases, which makes it even more amazing to use as large-scale systems that are not using only a single database.

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