Real World Use Cases and Applications of MongoDB

MongoDB’s focus is not only on the database but on overall data. Services like MongoDB Atlas, a database-as-a-service on multi-cloud and MongoDB stitch, are used to build faster and better applications on serverless environments.

MongoDB is the preferred database of leading enterprises and powers up products and solutions at various establishments including AstraZeneca, Adobe, eBay, Electronic Arts, SAP, CISCO, Google, Verizon, and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

In this blog, we take you through some of the top real-world use cases of MongoDB ranging across mobile, internet of things, content management, real-time analytics, and mainframe offloading.

Mobile

Customers these days want to have their business on the smartphone. Millions of users use their applications constantly. RDBMS cannot handle such large simultaneous transactions, and MongoDB provides a cost-effective way to scale the users and mobile app development. MongoDB Mobile applications have been used by several financial bodies, healthcare providers, and retail giants. MongoDB’s flexible data model and rich query functionality enable teams to build killer mobile apps and help customers to grow their business.

Enterprises like Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) and The Weather Channel have been very vocal about their awesome experience of using MongoDB for their mobile apps to grow their business.

ADP has satisfied more than 41000 of its clients by managing their employee’s finances, health, and working lives. Employees can see the information about their health, paychecks, insurance, and other benefits on the mobile app. Currently, the ADP mobile app is used in 17 countries and 23 languages serving more than one million users. Low cost and minimal downtime were needs for a mobile app that MongoDB was able to deliver.

The Weather Channel was running their website, weather.com, and facing issues serving a large number of clients due to the use of the traditional RDBMS database. MongoDB helped them build their Mobile app serving more than 40 million users and providing real-time weather data to their customers. The development release that was taking weeks earlier was pushed within hours and helped The weather channel have an advantage over their competitors.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Today, IoT connects billions of devices worldwide. Companies are redefining their revenue models, improving productivity, and leveraging operational efficiency by realizing the business value of connecting all things. MongoDB helps in capturing most from IoT devices. IoT devices have event-driven real-time architecture, require high-speed data ingest and fast development cycles to match changing needs, and MongoDB serves all these things efficiently.

MongoDB's intelligent data platform accelerates the delivery and operation of IoT devices. MongoDB has bonded with technologies like Apache Kafka to be part of an integrated and event-driven IoT platform.

Bosch is leading the charge for IoT betting on MongoDB for building their application. Bosch with more than 300000 employees, is known as one of the largest automotive component manufacturers.

Bosch uses several apps collecting data from IoT like braking systems and power steering to improve diagnostics and preventive maintenance needs. Bosch can now also monitor how operators use highly advanced power tools to tighten more than 6 million screws of aircraft. MongoDB has played an important role in building such modern apps.

Content Management

In the 90’s one could build a website with static text, but today with the changing times, a website must-have array of text, audio, video, and social media to get the user’s attention. Building such an application on a relational database is not easy. MongoDB provides the customers with the ability to have such content on a single database as it supports a variety of structured and unstructured data.

Forbes, As a story goes viral, people visit whatever website they can to get the information. To retain the reader, publishers have to be on their toes and provide share-worthy content as quickly as possible.

Using MongoDB, Forbes was able to build its CMS within two months and its mobile application within one month. Forbes changed its entire website and moved to MongoDB so that content can be added from anywhere around the globe without going offline in a quick manner.

Gaming

Data has been an integral part of video games. From managing player profiles to leaderboards, data plays an important role in making gaming better. But now, with most of the games being played online where one may start the game with a small number of users but need to scale to millions of users in no time. Choosing the correct database can prove to be a game-changer as multiplayer playing online with scale capabilities can make your game popular. Many gaming companies are leveraging MongoDB atlas, which is a multi-cloud database-as-a-service helping scale up and down automatically.

Popular Gaming companies like SEGA, FACEIT, and Lucid Sight are successfully using MongoDB for their users’ better gaming experience.

FACEIT uses MongoDB as their main database under the hood. Orchestrating the services between players, teams and competitions are all managed by MongoDB. FACEIT uses MongoDB even to manage all user profiles and tournament data. Live streaming data from the game is stored in MongoDB and analytics to track player behavior and engagement is done on data. MongoDB’s flexible schema and rich query model helped FaceIT to maintain user profiles efficiently.

Real-Time Analytics

With RDBMS, there was a culture of having transactional and analytics databases separate. Daily data load was needed to move data from the transactional database to the analytics environment. With MongoDB, companies can analyze the data in real-time with less money.

Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) used MongoDB for analytics to cut crime and citizen welfare using an analytics platform called WindyGrid. Data from different stations, 911 calls, and Tweets are analyzed using MongoDB to better respond to emergencies. From better managing city traffic to garbage complaints, all are done using the WindyGrid application.

Otto is one of the largest e-commerce companies. With the cut-throat competition among retail clients, slow reaction time causes a lot of business loss as with many options, consumers don’t stay long. Otto used MongoDB to reduce their reaction time to 1–2 seconds. This was a huge challenge as we are talking about more than 500 brands on their website. The flexible schema capability combined with availability and scalability features helped Otto to reconstruct their entire catalog application on MongoDB.

Mainframe offloading

Even as we enter the Big Data era with new databases dominating the market, Mainframe continues to have a place in infrastructure despite the high operational cost. Many have found moving data off the Mainframe to be a difficult task, but MongoDB has proven to be way ahead in offloading data from mainframe systems efficiently, thus modernizing the apps and reducing the operational cost.

Human capital services like Alight Solutions have been successful in offloading their data from Mainframe to MongoDB, thus improving application performance by 250× and reducing the overall cost of operations.

MongoDB has grown fast and has taken over in the field of the database. There are several other use cases like managing biometric data of 1.3 billion Indians for Aadhar. This huge data is stored by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, India, in MongoDB. Among several databases, MongoDB is specifically used for storing images.

Internet-based popular photo-sharing vendor Shutterfly uses MongoDB for storing more than 6 billion images handling 10,000 transactions per second. The volume of data and high transaction rate forced them to move off Oracle to MongoDB.

In summary

Although it has taken a while for MongoDB to catch the wind, its popularity has clearly soared in the last few years. The demand for MongoDB database has increased exponentially and it has become one of the most used databases due to its flexible schema, MapReduce capability, and Scale performance.