Why MongoDB?
More and more developers are looking for alternatives to the relational database, and MongoDB is the leading alternative. MongoDB offers a number of compelling advantages:
Agility
MongoDB simplifies development. Data in MongoDB is stored in JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas, providing flexibility during the development process.
“MongoDB is in the sweet spot of performance and features. Its rich data types, querying, and in place updates reduced development time to minutes from days for modeling rich domain objects.”
Chandra Patni IGN
Scalability
With built-in support for horizontal scalability, MongoDB allows users to build and grow their applications more rapidly. With auto-sharding, you can easily distribute data across many nodes. Replica sets enable high availability, with automatic failover and recovery of database nodes within or across data centers.
“With foursquare’s growing popularity, we were fast approaching the point where it would no longer be feasible to store user checkins on a single physical machine. MongoDB's auto- sharding capabilities enabled us to easily transition to a multi-node cluster that will enable us to continue to grow for the foreseeable future.”
Harry Heymann Engineering Lead at foursquare
Enterprise Readiness
Robust technology: Unlike many noSQL databases, MongoDB supports full consistency and transactional updates. Data integrity is guaranteed through journalling and replication.
Leading enterprise customers: MongoDB isn’t just for web startups: the 5 largest organizations using MongoDB average over $70 billion in annual revenue, larger than Boeing, Goldman Sachs, or Pfizer.
Clear vision: MongoDB aims to provide greater agility and scalability for many applications by eliminating joins and relational modeling. We expect to coexist with relational databases and provide many of the features developers have come to expect like indexes and full consistency.
Strong team: 10gen, the company which builds and supports MongoDB, is led by seasoned executives and technologists with senior leadership experience at many of the worlds leading technology companies, including 2 executives and 4 senior engineers with over 50 years combined experience at Oracle. 10gen is backed by leading venture capital firms who invested in established leaders like Oracle, Cisco and Apple as well as rapidly growing internet companies like Zynga and Twitter.
The support you need: 10gen offers a broad range of services from 24x7 enterprise support to training, architecture consulting, deploymentplanning, and systems monitoring. In addition, 10gen has full ownership of the MongoDB code and can offer commercial licenses for organizations unable to use open-source-licensed software.
Community
MongoDB has the strongest and most vibrant community among alternative databases. Adoption is growing, with customers ranging from Fortune 10 enterprises to fast growing internet companies like foursquare. There are thousands of production deployments of MongoDB, thousands of job searches in progress for MongoDB developers, thousands of developers attending MongoDB conferences, and thousands of user messages exchanged each month on MongoDB forums.