what-is-so-exciting-about-mongodbThe main task of programs and programming is telling computers what to do. When programs are successful at that job, interesting and innovative things happen. MongoDB is a whole new way of telling computers how to organize information.

Programmers and computer linguists who learn how to use MongoDB will control the next generation of information collating and storage. According to the ranking in DB-Engines, in December 2015 MongoDB is fast moving up, and is currently number 4 in terms of popularity of database management systems.

MongoDB handles information is new ways

Tables have long been the standard way of handling data regardless of how much the various computer languages have changed over the years. For over 30 years the main structure for handling data has been a set of rows made up of columns that contained data. This was known as the relational database, and became popular in the 1980’s because of its ability to handle transactions, its fast queries, and its spatial efficiency.

This form of data storage has created a great deal of difficulty for programmers as they have worked overtime to change the essence of data from an object form to a relational form and back again. Tools evolved (Object-Relational Mapping systems) for every language that was object-based, but using then has been a time-intensive job.

In the 90’s attempts were made to create object databases as alternatives to the relational databases, but there was no real success. MongoDB is one of the first successful document databases that no longer uses two-dimensional, flat tables for record storage.

MongoDB instead stores documents. For instance, a table without a column for a first initial could not fully store the name B. Daniel Boone. The name would be stored without the first initial, or the intake person would insist on using B. Daniel Boone’s full first name. With MongoDB, the whole name can be stored as B. Daniel Boone, with the next name stored as Martha Boone, no first initial. Even if Daniel had two first initials, the record could be stored in MongoDB because it is stored as a document and not in table format.

Uses for MongoDB

MongoDB has certain advantages as a no-SQL database management storage system over the SQL systems. It is an excellent tool for handling:

  • User profiles and accounts because it can easily store diverse addresses and user information
  • Content Management Systems because it can store different collections with diverse content in the document format that is not locked into tables
  • Form data in which fields are added or deleted over time because each record is stored intact
  • Messages, as they can vary in type and content
  • System configuration is easy in MongoDB with a graph of values
  • Structured log data
  • Graphs of any type
  • Location based data as it has geo-spatial capacities.

MongoDb is a JSON-based document structure. Although JSON originated from the JavaScript scripting language, it is now independent of any language and its code is available for many programming languages. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is an open standard using text that is human-readable. It is an exciting development that can handle huge quantities of data with ease.