What is Percona MongoDB?

Percona MongoDB is a free and open-source replacement for MongoDB Community edition. This version of MongoDB is offered by a third-party developer, not MongoDB directly. The primary focus of Percona is bringing enterprise-grade features to a free database. Organizations and developers unable to afford the high costs associated with MongoDB Enterprise licensing can leverage Percona for important benefits and features.

Benefits of Percona MongoDB

• Easily replace MongoDB Community edition: You set up Percona MongoDB as a drop-in replacement, so you don’t have to go through a complicated deployment process. Quickly get started with this interesting alternative to first-party MongoDB versions.
• Optimize your database performance: Percona has a strong focus on performance optimization, so you’re able to tune your databases so they can better support your applications.
• Improve database reliability: MongoDB is already designed for high availability, and Percona adds hot backups and refinable shard keys into the mix. You can also leverage Percona-specific tools to achieve very low latency, query performance analytics, real-time monitoring, and robust management.
• Encrypt your sensitive data and data at rest: As an enterprise-grade edition, Percona gives you many ways to protect your data. An encrypted storage engine, key vault, authentication plugin, and other security measures improve your application security.
• Gain visibility into user activities and database operations: An auditing tool allows you to keep a close eye on what users are doing when they’re accessing data, in case you run into a data breach, loss, or another issue.
• Remove sensitive data from your logs: Avoid accidentally breaching sensitive data by proactively redacting it from your database logs.
• Enjoy familiar MongoDB architecture and capabilities: Since Percona uses MongoDB Community edition as its base, you get to leverage all of the capabilities that you’re already familiar with. Adopting a well-known solution takes much less time than trying to switch your development team to a new-to-them database.

Major Features of Percona MongoDB

• Supports OpenLDAP and Active Directory
• HashiCorp Vault integration
• Hot backups
• Flexible data schemas
• Percona Kubernetes Operator
• Percona Toolkit
• Percona Monitoring and Management
• WiredTiger storage engine
• Commercial support available
• Distributed transactions

Should You Use Percona MongoDB?

Percona MongoDB offers a third-party MongoDB alternative that sits between Community and Enterprise edition. If you find yourself constrained by the Community edition or have data security and compliance requirements that exceed its capabilities, then Percona offers a step-up without incurring the licensing costs associated with Enterprise edition or the subscription and storage fees of MongoDB Atlas.

Many workloads may not need all of the features offered by Enterprise, but do need one or two critical options. Percona can help you explore these functionalities and choose the ones that work best for your application requirements. If you don’t think that any of these features are compelling, then the Community edition may be the better choice.

Looking for information on other versions of MongoDB: check out my blogs on Enterprise Edition, Community Edition and MongoDB Atlas.