Exploring MongoDB: Community Edition

MongoDB Community edition is a free, open-source database that is a popular option for powering modern applications. It’s a document-based and distributed database that was designed to leverage cloud technologies. While this may be the lowest-cost way to get started with MongoDB, it still delivers many exceptional benefits and features.

Benefits of MongoDB Community Edition

MongoDB Community edition offers a surprising amount of capabilities given that it’s free software. It’s more than an affordable introduction to the potential of MongoDB. Community edition stands on its own, and is often powerful enough to create a long-lasting foundation for your development projects.

• Uses the schema you want: You don’t need to choose a schema that’s poorly suited for your workloads. MongoDB’s flexibility allows you to pick the one that meets your needs.
• Leverages a JSON-based query language: This database technology makes it simple and intuitive to set up queries. You can do it through JSON rather than trying to go through MySQL.
• Supports common use cases for modern applications: Today’s applications use data in a much different way than legacy software. MongoDB empowers your modern application use cases through real-time aggregation and other robust features.
• Reduces the potential for data loss: Built-in replication protects your databases from unexpected failure. If something goes wrong, you still have access to your vital databases.
• Access your database when you need it: Automatic failover is among the many high availability features of MongoDB. You don’t need an enterprise-grade package to take advantage of this functionality.
• Easily use database sharding: Optimize your application performance through native sharding features. You can horizontally scale as much as you need, to ensure that your databases can meet your workload demands.
• Set up ad hoc queries: Analyze your data any way you want to through ad hoc queries. Dive deep into this information so you can discover new insights and make better data-driven decisions.
• Expand your MongoDB experience through the community: This open-source database has enthusiastic support from the third-party development community. You can easily extend the base database technology through contributions from this community. If you run into questions or problems while you’re working with the database, you can also access a variety of documentation and peer support.
• Access to a broad talent pool: MongoDB is a popular database, so it’s easy to find talent and managed services providers when you need more staffing.

Major Features of MongoDB Community Edition

MongoDB Community edition also offers these features:

• Arrays and nested objects are stored as values
• High availability
• Nest values as deep as you want
• Sort by any database field
• Real-time aggregation
• Indexing

Should You Use MongoDB Community Edition?

The free license of the Community edition offers a low barrier to entry for adoption. When you’re first getting started with MongoDB, testing out application prototypes, and exploring the possibilities of this database, this edition is an excellent choice. It also works well for small and medium-sized applications that don’t need to leverage enterprise-grade features, such as LDAP.

As your organization or development needs grow, you may find that MongoDB Community edition doesn’t quite fit your operational requirements. You have other editions of the database you can turn to in these situations, as well as a vibrant third-party developer community that can extend MongoDB functionality.

Looking for information on MongoDB: Enterprise Edition? Check out my blog on that version here.