IT era in 1980s and 1990s were defined by the buzz of RDBMS, multi-tier applications and World Wide Web. That was the era when various sectors recognized the ‘magic’ of computer programs and networks, the efficiency with which work can be done with a silly box. While use of computers and dependency on WWW increased, various industries matured as well and have come up with their own needs and demands. Today’s need has changed, requirements can’t be fulfilled with ‘simple’ multi-tier architecture-they demand multi-node computing. Currently our lives are inter-woven into the WWW web and data generated is not structured. Such requirements can’t be fulfilled with RDBMS alone, it needs a schema less database. Web has become accessible to everyone and hence there is a serious demand for scaling. At the same time, the rapidly changing industries demand a rapid and agile application development methodology.
Database is a key technology in digitization and today’s relational database technology lack these features. Relational database by their design are bound by certain rules which were necessary for maintaining reliability of computer systems against various crashes and failures. Today’s not only the reliability and redundancy of system has increased but there are various requirements which can do away without restrictions like Normalization and ACID Transaction.
This has created a demand for a schema-less database which can work and distribute data across multiple nodes. Today’s agile development lifecycle demands a database which is removes the hard coupling between application and database schema. For last few years, several technologies tried to fit into this gap, arguably MongoDB has seen most success in this.
MongoDB is a document store database which stores data in JSON format. Our team has been exploring MongoDB for the last few months and has found it quite exciting. Some of its key features are – Sharding or distributed database, replication, scalability and auto-failover and schema-less flexible data store. These features are designed keeping in mind the current demand and expectation from the IT industry. We will be sharing our experience and learning in future releases. Stay tuned!