mongodbMongoDB is a relatively new contender in the data storage circle compared to giant like Oracle and IBM DB2, but it has gained huge popularity with their distributed key value store, MapReduce calculation capability and document oriented NoSQL features.

MongoDB has be rightfully acclaimed as the “Database Management System of the Year” by DB-Engines.

Along with these feature, MongoDB has numerous advantages when compared to the traditional RDBMS.  As a result, lots of companies are vying to employ MongoDB database. Here is a look at some of the real world use cases, where organisation, if not entirely are including at least as an addition to their existing databases.

Aadhar:

Adhar is an excellent example of real world use cases of MongoDB. In recent times, there has been some controversy revolving around CIA’s non-profit Venture Capital arm, In-Q-Tel, backing the company which developed MongoDB. Putting aside the controversy, let’s look at the MongoDB’s role in Aadhar.

India’s Unique Identification project, aka Aadhar, is the world’s biggest biometrics database. Aadhar is in the process of capturing demographic and biometric data of over 1.2 billion residents. Aadhar has used MongoDB as one of its database to store this huge amount of data. MongoDB was among several database products, apart from MySQL, Hadoop and HBase, originally procured for running the database search. Here, MySQL is used for storing demographic data and MongoDB is used to store images. According to techcrunch.com, MongoDB has nothing to do with the “sensitive” data.

Shutterfly:

Shutterfly is a popular Internet-based photo sharing and personal publishing company that manages a store of more than 6 billion images with a transaction rate of up to 10,000 operations per second. Shutterfly is one of the companies that transitioned from Oracle to MongoDB.

During the evaluation at the time of transitioning to MongoDB, it became apparent that a non-relational database would be a better suited for Shutterfly’s data needs and there by possibly improving programmer productivity as well as performance and scalability.

Shutterfly considered a wide variety of alternate database systems, including Cassandra, CouchDB and BerkeleyDB, before settling on the MongoDB. Shutterfly has installed MongoDB for metadata associated with uploaded photos. And for those parts of the application which require richer transactional model, like billing and account management, the traditional RDBMS is still in place.

Till now, Shutterfly is happy with its decision of transitioning to MongoDB and this is verified by Kenny Gorman’s (Data Architect of Shutterfly) statement, “I am a firm believer in choosing the correct tool for the job, and MongoDB was a nice fit, but not without compromises.”

MetLife:

MetLife is a leading global provider of insurance, annuities and employee benefit programs. They serve about 90 million customers and hold leading market positions in the United States, Japan, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. MetLife uses MongoDB for “The Wall”, an innovative customer service application that provides a consolidated view of MetLife customers, including policy details and transactions. The Wall is designed to look and function like Facebook and has improved customer satisfaction and call centre productivity. The Wall brings together data from more than 70 legacy systems and merges it into a single record. It runs across six servers in two data centres and presently stores about 24 terabytes of data. MongoDB-based applications are part of a series of Big Data projects that MetLife is working on to transform the company and bring technology, business and customers together.

eBay:

eBay is an American multinational internet consumer-to-consumer corporation, headquartered in San Jose. eBay has a number of projects running on MongoDB for search suggestions, metadata storage, cloud management and merchandizing categorization.

The above is just a hint at companies using MongoDB is .Here is a comprehensive list of all the companies using MongoDB. Most of the companies in this list, use MongoDB as their primary database.