Organizations building content-driven applications face new challenges — incorporating rich media, personalizing content in real-time, making content interactive, and supporting millions of users across multiple devices and platforms. To build next-generation content management and delivery applications, leading organizations are relying on MongoDB to realize accelerated time to market, new use cases and superior user experience.
Challenges
Content management and delivery comprises a diverse set of applications that store and serve content, as well as the associated metadata. These apps include e-commerce websites, online publications, product catalogs, photo sharing apps and more.
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Volume and Variety. Organizations are storing massive volumes and various types of data – structured, semi-structured, unstructured, polymorphic and hierarchical in nature. For instance, a product catalog may store tens of millions of products, each with different characteristics and metadata.
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Dynamic Content. It is no longer sufficient to serve static content. Users demand dynamic content personalized for their needs and interests. Similarly, pricing models and discount schedules are moving towards adaptive models that react to changes in demand, customer behavior and inventory levels. This means product meta-data is highly dynamic.
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Social. To increase engagement, many organizations are integrating social components into content-related applications, like commenting and sharing.
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Enormous User Bases. An internal application may support hundreds or thousands of users. But a flash sales site, photo-sharing app or news website may grow to attract millions of users in a matter of months. The database must be able to support a user base of any scale, reliably and cost-effectively.
Relational databases are ill-suited to the evolving needs of content management given the difficulties of storing varied complex data in a single data store. Additionally, the time required to add new data types and the costly infrastructure required to scale out relational databases create an obstacle to using them for modern use cases. The MongoDB NoSQL database is built for today's applications.
MongoDB Solution
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Dynamic Schemas. MongoDB's NoSQL document data model provides a dynamic schema that can accommodate varied data and metadata requirements. Additionally, its alignment with modern object-oriented programming models makes it a perfect fit for agile development.
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Real-Time. The real-time characteristics of MongoDB allow organizations to provide highly interactive experiences to users for both reading from and writing to the database. Organizations can serve the right content to users at the right time leveraging MongoDB's full query language and real-time analytics capabilities – capabilities they have come to expect from relational databases.
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Horizontal Scaling. Auto-sharding makes it possible to scale the database as data volumes and demands on the data store grow, making MongoDB a reliable platform for persistent systems of record.
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Rich Media. Using GridFS, organizations can actually store and serve rich media such as video, images and audio n the database itself.
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Full-Text Search. Integrated full-text search will allow users to navigate content with Google-like syntax. (Full-text search will be available as an experimental feature in MongoDB's upcoming public release, MongoDB 2.4.)
Benefits
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Faster Time to Market. By making it easy to update and grow the database as business needs evolve, MongoDB delivers agility and accelerated time to market.
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Operational Simplicity. Storing and delivering diverse content in a single data store reduces operational complexity.
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Superior User Experience. MongoDB's flexible and high-performance NoSQL platform enables organizations to build applications that were previously not feasible, and more importantly, provide a superior user experience.
