What is MongoDB?

MongoDB is an open source, document-oriented database designed with both scalability and developer agility in mind. Instead of storing your data in tables and rows as you would with a relational database, in MongoDB you store JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas. The goal of MongoDB is to bridge the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and scalable) and relational databases (which have rich functionality).

Using BSON (binary JSON), developers can easily map to modern object-oriented languages without a complicated ORM layer. This new data model simplifies coding significantly, and also improves performance by grouping relevant data together internally.

MongoDB was created by former DoubleClick Founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick engineer and ShopWiki Founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz. They drew upon their experiences building large scale, high availability, robust systems to create a new kind of database. MongoDB maintains many of the great features of a relational database -- like indexes and dynamic queries. But by changing the data model from relational to document-oriented, you gain many advantages, including greater agility through flexible schemas and easier horizontal scalability.