MongoDB Use Cases | How eBay implemented MongoDB?

Rutujakonde
4 min readMay 10, 2021

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In today’s rapidly increasing database market, it is important to select the right database. Although RDBMS databases like SQL, Oracle, Postgres are there, but the NOSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassendra, HBase grows rapidly.

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.

How eBay Implemented MongoDB?

eBay is a multinational company that provides a platform for the customer to customer sales. It is currently running a large number of projects in MongoDB like merchandising categorization, cloud management, metadata storage, search suggestions.

eBay made search suggestion list in MongoDB which was then indexed by word prefix and additionally with metadata such as product category. The multiple indexes provided them the flexibility to look up for suggestions and process queries speedily. Prior, eBay was able to use just a single replica set which made sharding unnecessary. Additionally, data was placed inside memory which in return boost query processing speed.

Why Use MongoDB Instead of MySQL?

o MongoDB database service enables us to build applications that are faster, reliable, handles a diverse range of data and manage applications in an effective way.

o Web-based database development is simplified to a great extent as MongoDB documents are mapped to modern and OOP languages. Using MongoDB, you can remove the complex ORM layer that translates all objects in code to the relational database.

o MongoDB is flexible as compared to MySQL which means that your database schema can emerge with business requirements.

Is MongoDB Right For Your Application?

Every data environment is different. They’re built to meet your ideal business challenges. So depending on your organization’s need, MongoDB may prove to be the best solution as compared to RDBMS. So, while identifying your database options, there are few things that you should consider.

1. Your existing architecture & network infrastructure.

2. Do you need to pull data from a specific location?

3. How much you expect your data to grow?

4. Are you working structured data from or you have modern unstructured data?

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.

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.

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/she can get a specific version of Consistency in MongoDB applications.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

SUMMARY

Although it has taken a while for MongoDB to use, its popularity has clearly increased 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.

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