In recent years, we have seen a growing interest in database management systems that differ from traditional relational model. Central to this is the concept of NoSQL, a term used to denote collectively software databases that do not use SQL (Structured Query Language) to interact with stored data.

One of the most notable NoSQL projects to date is MongoDB, a database-driven  free software project that stores data in collections of JSON-like documents. What distinguishes MongoDB NoSQL databases from other NoSQL projects is its powerful query language based document system, which makes the transition from a relational database to MongoDB easy because the queries are converted fairly painlessly.

At the MongoDB Days 2013 event in New York, we saw great interest among the companies who have taken a greater benefit from the introduction of the database.

Ready for Today Demands

Document-structured NoSQL database systems, such as MongoDB, are quite different from traditional relational databases. Instead of storing data in rigid structures, such as tables, they store it in loosely defined objects (or documents). Another key difference is that databases oriented for documents do not provide strict relationships between documents, which helps maintain design without layout.

This works very well for many applications where it makes sense to get the data self-contained within a parent document–a good example is the MongoDB’s prominent position in modern application development. IBM and 10gen, the developer of MongoDB, announced their collaboration earlier this month to enable the technology to more easily embrace mobile computing.

Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and WebSphere CTO, discussed in theCUBE interview series that driving this standard will help unlock all of the data that exists within an enterprise and simplify the creation of next generation mobile and web apps for all platforms.

Charity Majors, Systems Engineer at Parse, discussed that MongoDB plays an important role in writing a mobile app or game. Parse is a Mobile Backend-as-a-Service that has over 100,000 apps.

She said flexibility is what makes MongoDB  different from other databases. “With MongoDB, the app data is stored, and can be used for back-end analytics, aggregation. MongoDB is probably the only database out there that can let us do what we’ve done in the time frame that we’ve done it.”

Majors said that developers need to focus on managing the MongoDB ecosystem: how to automate it, tune for performance, tweak the infrastructure, as well as explore fun failure scenarios, and how to recover from them.

Another example of flexibility came from Miles Ward, Solutions Architect with AWS. Ward said a whole new set of technology tools are in development using MongoDB that have altered the baseline of what you can squeeze – from a performance standpoint – out of hardware.

Hadoop + MongoDB = The Beginning

10gen recently released a Hadoop plugin for MongoDB. With Hadoop MapReduce, Java and Scala, developers will find a native solution for using MapReduce to process their data with MongoDB for large-scale distributed data processing.

Matt Asay, the VP of Business Development & Corporate Strategy at 10gen, spoke more about the MongoDB/Hadoop integration at the MongoDB Days 2013 event in NYC. He said the marriage between Hadoop for analytical processing and MongoDB for storage is perfect combination for enterprises. He added there has been talk with a number of Hadoop vendors to figure out MongoDB is the best tool for the job.

Developers of all kinds can find a new way to work with ETL to extract and analyze large datasets and persist the results to MongoDB. Python and Ruby developers can also use native Mongo MapReduce using the Hadoop Streaming interfaces to create scale out applications.

Mongo Capabilities

Indeed while MongoDB is popular, the simplicity of this hybrid approach makes MongoDB an excellent choice for those who are used to working with SQL. It supports resource query optimization using tips, explains plans and profiles, and storage-based object collection, allowing consultation where reference data are required normalized.

Jon Hoffman, Engineer Infrastructure Lead at Foursquare, is in the same line on Mongo capabilities. Foursquare has chosen Mongo because server-oriented architecture generates lots of data and Mongo was the right choice to shard the data.

“The exponential growth in data made it clear that it was going to become impossible to keep it all on one server, even with the biggest server available at the time. There was the need to shard the data. That can be done in many ways, either on a SQL engine, managing the data splits yourself, or with the help of a tool like Mongo, where a lot of that infrastructure and heavy-lifting is handled for you,” he said.

Jigesh Saheba, Chief Architect, ADP Innovation Labs, also agreed on the MongoDB capabilities. He said they wanted to create an architecture and product that addressed a lot of the demands of the modern consumer and Mongo was best fitted on their requirement. It offers high performance, scalability and reliability while also preserving the data manipulation capabilities of traditional relational databases.