Thursday, September 19, 2013

Transactions in MongoDB

In my previous blog post, we had gone through some of the advantages of MongoDB in terms of schema flexibility and performance. The Metlife case study showed how we can quickly create a customer hub using MongoDB that supports flexible dynamic schemas.

Another added advantage of using MongoDB is that you don't have to worry about ORM tools, as there is no object-relational impedance mismatch. Also you don't have to worry about creating an application cache, as MongoDB be default uses all available memory for its working set.

But what about transactions? Any OLTP application would need full support for ACID to ensure reliability and consistency of data. The following articles shed good light on the transaction support in MongoDB.

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/fundamentals/
http://css.dzone.com/articles/how-acid-mongodb
http://blog.scrapinghub.com/2013/05/13/mongo-bad-for-scraped-data/

MongoDB only supports "Atomicity" at the document level. It's important to remember that we can have nested documents and MongoDB would support atomicity across the nested documents. But if we need multi-object transaction support, then MongoDB is not a good fit.

Also if your application needs to "join" objects frequently, then MongoDB is also not suitable in that respect. For e.g. loading reference data (static data) from master tables with the transaction data.  
MongoDB locks (Readers-Writer lock) are at the database level; i.e. entire database gets locked during a write operation. This can result in lock contention when you have a large number of write operations.

Looking at the pros-n-cons of MongoDB, IMHO it is best suited for heavy-read operations type of application. For e.g. a consolidated high performance read-only customer hub, a data store for content management systems, product catalogs in e-commerce systems, etc.

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