MongoDB Real World Use Cases: Advantages & Top Companies [2024]

MongoDB, a standout database for its adaptability and big data management, has been named the best database system. In my journey as a full-stack developer, I’ve observed MongoDB’s pivotal role. Giants like Forbes and Toyota depend on it, showcasing its reliability. This adoption by over 31,000 companies highlights its importance, directly linked to the skyrocketing salaries for full-stack developers in India. My experience confirms that expertise in MongoDB not only opens many doors but also significantly boosts your value in the job market. Employers are in constant search for certified MongoDB professionals, making it a key reason behind the lucrative salaries in the field. This trend underscores MongoDB’s impact on operational growth and the rewarding career it promises for skilled developers in India. Keep scrolling to know about some of the MongoDB real world use cases.

What is MongoDB?

Before we look at some of the real-world cases or practical applications of MongoDB, it is pertinent to understand what is MongoDB. A lot of people feel that learning MongoDB is complicated. However, you can simply understand it as a database platform. Large-scale companies use MongoDB to store and manage essential information. It is an open-source documented database that allows programmers to store data in flexible forms. This means that One of the most significant advantages of MongoDB is that it is a distributed database. Features like horizontal scaling, geographic distribution, and high availability are already available in the database.

MongoDB acts as a database server. It provides an environment where organizations can maintain several databases. However, one thing to note is that MongoDB is a schema-less database. It means there is no particular format in which we have to enter the data, and all documents are independent. MongoDB is more efficient in comparison to other programming languages like SQL. It facilitates storing nested data that can be used to store complex data patterns in the same documents. This makes it easier to fetch data and work on it.

MongoDB caters to a wide range of industries like software and technology, media and entertainment, telecommunications, financial services, healthcare and medical, hospitality and travel, education, and energy utilities. Even government agencies have started using MongoDB to store and manage tons of data.

Here are some popular MongoDB customers. Let us see how they are using MongoDB to scale their operations.

Some Real-World Companies That Use MongoDB 

1. eBay

eBay is a multinational company that provides a platform for the customer to customer sales.  As an eCommerce platform, eBay has to deal with storing and managing huge amounts of customer data. Dealing with such a large volume of data can be a cumbersome task. However, MongoDB has helped streamline this task for eBay. The company uses MongoDB to make a search suggestion feature, making it easier for customers to find relevant products in less time. It is currently running a large number of projects in MongoDB like merchandising categorization, cloud management, metadata storage, search suggestions.

2. MetLife

MetLife is a leading company in employee benefit programs, annuities, and insurance. There are more than 90 million customers in the Middle East, Europe, Aisa, Latin America, Japan, United States. MetLife is using MongoDB as a database engine for its advanced customer service application called The Wall.

This application provides a combined view of transactions, policy details, and other details of MetLife Customers. It looks like Wall of Facebook, which takes data from 70 legacy systems and merges it into a single record. It stores 24 Terabytes of data and runs across six servers in two data centers. MetLife is working on a series of Big Data projects where MongoDB-based applications are part of it. MetLife wall, created with the help of MongoDB, allows the company to have a 360-degree view of their customers, their policy details and transactions.

3. Shutterfly

Shutterfly is one of the most popular online photo sharing platforms, and it is using MongoDB to manage and store more than 6 billion images, which has a transaction rate of up to 10,000 operations per second. Shutterfly earlier used Oracle but later transitioned to MongoDB.

Shutterfly company realized that moving to a non-relational database will help them to increase their scalability, performance, and productivity of the programmer. The company decided to adopt a document database approach because of the large volumes of data involved.

Shutterfly did consider many other alternate database systems like BerkeleyDB, CouchDB, or Cassandra. The company has confirmed that they are pleased with their decision of transitioning from Oracle to MongoDB.

There were two main reasons for this transition – MongoDB allows flexibility with Schema and facilitates horizontal scalability. Shutterfly is using MongoDB Atlas as its database application. The business is running multiple Atlas clusters and efficiently managing thousands of transactions every minute. 

The company also used Mongomirror by MongoDB for quick data migration. Mongomirror is a tool that facilitates manual data migration from a MongoDB replica set to a MongoDB Atlas replica set. MongoDB helps the business scale effortlessly during the peak seasons and cope with customers’ demands

4. Aadhar

It is India’s Unique Identification project, which has the biggest biometrics database in the world. Aadhar Project is using MongoDB as its database to store a massive amount of demographic and biometric data of more than 1.2 billion Indians. MongoDB is being used for the storage of images in the Aadhar project.

 One of the major reasons why MongoDB was chosen to partner with the Aadhar project was that the database system facilitates capturing, processing, searching and analyzing a massive amount of unstructured datasets. Moreover, MongoDB is capable of storing large volumes of biometric data and images.

5.  Electronic Arts (EA)

EA is an online multiplayer game that is using MongoDB Database for its game called FIFA Online 3. It is one of the world’s best-selling video game franchises that caters to millions of players. This multiplayer game requires scalability to allow such a large number of players to use the platform. Since scalability is one of the most remarkable features of MongoDB, EA uses it to run multiple servers. EA currently uses over 250 MongoDB servers. MongoDB can easily handle complicated things that need synchronization with each other entirely.

6.  Vanta

One of the major issues that businesses come across is managing their compliance and security. According to a study by GlobalScape, the average cost of non-compliance for businesses is 2.7 times the cost of various compliances. Non-compliance can cause business disruption, revenue losses, fines, penalties, and settlement costs. This is why it is crucial for businesses to adhere to compliances. Some of the most suggested ways in which organizations can reduce their compliance cost are by checking the security effectiveness score (SES) by using a well-known indexing method. Vanta, a leading company that provides automated security and compliance services uses MongoDB Atlas to provide efficient security and compliance services. MongoDB helped the business to model their data and access it in a flexible manner, enabled faster integration of new features, and reduced downtime. Its virtual private cloud (VPC) peering feature also allows businesses to securely communicate with database clusters.

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Practical MongoDB Use Cases

Some documents are called MongoDB Use Case documents, which will help in introducing the operations used, designs, and patterns in MongoDB application development. Data Modeling Strategies and Application Design will be highlighted in these documents. If you are a beginner and would like to learn more, check out our digital marketing training from top universities. 

It will also give some special attention to scaling, sharding, performance, and indexing. Three case studies will be described, which are: content management case studies, product data management case studies, and operational intelligence case studies.

1. Content Management Systems

Fundamental of MongoDB approaches and practices are introduced in content management use cases, which would be done using familiar, simple examples and problems. The method for modeling user comments on content like media and blog spots are introduced by “Storing Comments”. A model is proposed for designing a website content management system by “Metadata and Asset Management” in MongoDB.  Hadoop Vs MongoDB

2. Product Data Management

For e-commerce websites and product data management and solutions, one can use MongoDB to store information because it has the flexible schema well suited for the job. One can also manage a product catalog and learn the practices and methods for modeling from the Product Catalog document.

They can also determine the pattern to handle interactions between user’s shopping carts and inventory using “Inventory Management.” MongoDB also has a report called “Category Hierarchy,” which will describe the techniques to do interaction with category hierarchies in MongoDB.

3. Operational Intelligence

MongoDB is beneficial for real-time analytics and operational intelligence use. One can learn “Storing Log Data” Document to know about the approaches and several ways to store and model machine-generated data with MongoDB. They can also determine the Hierarchical Aggregation Method to store and process hierarchical reports from raw event data according to the minute, hour, or day. 

Top MongoDB Usage

1. Mobility and Scaling

MongoDB is very scalable and flexible, which gives fantastic database solutions to deal with different kinds of environments. The schemas of MongoDB will evolve over time, and in this way, mobile application developers can focus their time on developing better customer experience. This will help many companies to deal with varying structures of data that are coming from many different sources in the mobile application development world.

MongoDB stands out in scaling and application mobility. As a full-stack developer, I’ve seen MongoDB’s ability to handle large datasets and seamlessly scale horizontally. Its sharding capabilities and flexible architecture make it a go-to choice for applications demanding scalability and mobility across various platforms. 

2. Real-Time Data Integration

There is a lot of value to data if it is consolidated and aggregated into one single view, and MongoDB plays a vital role in doing that. Due to the query capabilities and flexibility of MongoDB, now it is easier to aggregate data and create those tools which will make an organization more efficient.

With the help of MongoDB, one can see aggregated data in a single view in real-time, which provides massive value to the companies. A developer can also take quick action on specific events and also monitor with the help of MongoDB 3.6.

3. Product Catalog

There are many attributes to products which are easily stored as an object using MongoDB and can be used to understand the customer better in the digital experience. Nowadays, the quality and volume of data are increasing and are being used to improve the interaction in product catalogs of customers. MongoDB has dynamic schema capability, which helps in bringing relevancy between attributes and product documents. It will provide a better experience for both customers and developers.

4.Product Data Management:  

In my experience, MongoDB excels in Product Data Management, offering a robust solution for handling diverse product information. Its flexible document-oriented structure allows for efficient storage and retrieval of complex product data. MongoDB empowers businesses to organize, update, and retrieve product details seamlessly, making it an ideal choice for companies dealing with extensive product catalogs. 

5.Customer Analytics:  

In the realm of Customer Analytics, MongoDB proves invaluable. Its agile data model enables businesses to capture, analyze, and derive insights from customer data. MongoDB’s ability to handle unstructured data makes it adept at managing diverse customer information, providing businesses with a comprehensive view for data-driven decision-making. 

6.Mainframe Offloading:  

MongoDB is a game-changer in Mainframe Offloading. With its document-oriented approach, it simplifies the migration of mainframe data to modern, scalable architectures. MongoDB’s compatibility with cloud environments and ability to handle diverse data types make it an efficient choice for organizations seeking to offload mainframe workloads, enhancing performance and agility. 

MongoDB Applications

There are many MongoDB applications, and here they are:

1. Balanced Features 

One can use MongoDB to get multiple balanced features. For example, that one wants to use some features like Queuing, Map/Reduce, FTS but don’t require it a lot, which is easily possible through MongoDB.

2. Consistency over Availability

If one prefers consistency over availability, then he can get a specific version of Consistency in MongoDB applications.

3. Denormalizing the Data

Re-denormalizing the data is tough to do and also very expensive. Also, you will not be able to change the shard keys when you are running MongoDB.

The mix of Secondary indexes and Key/Value lookups

If you want to use a blend of secondary indexes and key/value lookups, then you can use MongoDB. But you cannot use it for too many secondary indexes because it will start scaling poorly.

4. Data on Single Server

One of the best features of MongoDB is that it was made intentionally sub-optimal to enable sharding on a single server. But you can use PostgreSQl, If the data fits on a single server comfortably.

5. Ideal for Querying

If the rate of querying is very strong to the database, then Mongo is ideal to be used because it resembles a DWH cube in its basic data structure.

6. Ideal for Documented-oriented

MongoDB is the right choice only when there are few relations, and one wants to scale it. It might not be suitable to use when there are too many relations, such as a social network. But it can be amazing to see as to how it will handle the document-oriented store. MongoDB is ideal for storing loads of documents that can be sorted by a tag or category. It stores records as documents in the form of compressed BSON files. We can directly retrieve these documents in the JSON format that can be easily read by humans. MongoDB, being a document-oriented database, enables storing both structured and unstructured data in the same document.

7. Polyglot Database System

MongoDB has an excellent capability to pick up the best part of all the databases, which makes it even more amazing to use as large-scale systems that are not using only a single database.

Conclusion

The demand for NoSQL databases like MongoDB has gone up in the recent times. Here are some real-world use cases of MongoDB along with some companies that use MongoDB for their practical applications. We hope this article will help you understand MongoDB and it;s practical applications.

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