MySQL for Supply Chain

What This Article Covers

• Interesting aspects of the mongoDB

Background

In a previous post we discussed the emergence of NoSQL products, one of which, MongoDB caught our eye. We began by reading part of the the book “MongoDB: The Definitive Guide,” by Kristina Chodorow and Michael Dirolf and published by O’Reilly. We found the following points instructive, not only about MongoDB, but about what is says regarding SQL databases generally.

1. MongoDB has some of the features of a SQL database including indexes, range queries and sorting.
2. The authors hail its ease of use.
3. The database can be interoperated with using JavaScript. In fact the test database online is a JavaScript Shell. Obviously, MongoDB does not use SQL.
4. MongoDB and NoSQL in general replaces the concept of a row with a document. The book states the primary reason for doing this is making scaling easier. This allows “the representation of complex hierarchical relationships with a single record and this fits nicely into the way developers think about their data.
5. Each document has its own “_id”
6. A collection is a group of documents
7. Groups of different collections are different databases.
8. As one would expect, MongoDB is schema-free. This eases large data migrations. It’s also gives developers more freedom in terms of how they model (one also wonders if it gives developers less overhead to manage)
9. Amazingly, the book proposes that the massive increase in data is placing pressure on the SQL model. (This is interesting to me because I had always heard that SQL databases were able to take the most volume when compared to other data repository types. If NoSQL has improved on this volume management of SQL, then things could get really interesting for this technology / approach.)
10. MongoDB was designed from the beginning to “scale out” which means to be moved over multiple machines, which increases its scalability at a lower cost than SQL (this means the database does not have to be ported to a new machine if it outgrows it.
11. MongoDB follows a very low maintenance approach with respect to databases

Conclusion

A lot more investigation is necessary to see how we can use, and if we can use MongoDB. However, it sounds intriguing so far.

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