Oracle announces support for MongoDB – it’s more than just an API

Oracle announced the availability of the Oracle Database API for MongoDB. This service allows enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of Oracle Autonomous Database without sacrificing or modifying their MongoDB environments. If you’re an enterprise IT organization looking to get the most out of your organization’s data, this is important. And, if you’re a developer looking to continue leveraging MongoDB while accessing Oracle’s multi-model database, that’s good news.

This move by Oracle helps the company a lot in repositioning itself as an open cloud platform that can support the entire enterprise. And it will support the continued strong adoption of MongoDB in the enterprise application space. I’ll cover that in the next few paragraphs.

First, the configuration – valuable data is available in all formats

We live in a data-driven world. Data drives the operations of the largest companies and the lives of people. In addition, data is generated everywhere and in many different formats. Many remember the rise of Big Data some time ago – NoSQL was the database format to support these many data types.

NoSQL is an umbrella term that refers to several categories of non-relational databases. One such category, document-oriented stores, is popular among app developers looking for an easy way to store and use data in apps. Think of e-commerce sites with a product catalog or an insurance company that easily stores insurance policies. These are use cases where a document database can be used effectively.

MongoDB is the most popular NoSQL document database. This popularity is partly due to the scalable nature of MongoDB, partly due to the ease of onboarding application developers on the back-end, and partly due to its current position in the market.

The NoSQL family has been the cool children of the database world for the past decade, around the time big data took off. And MongoDB is the cool kid of those cool kid cliques. And for good reason. It’s easy to set up and use, performs well, and has good support across the industry.

But here is the challenge. Enterprise organizations are neither when it comes to data management. The typical business will have a variety of SQL and NoSQL data environments. And the data that resides in each of these data stores is valuable. Additionally, summarizing data across all data stores is essential to driving digital business, but not easily done across the NoSQL-SQL chasm. This often requires a separate database and tools for analysis and moving data from one database to another.

Centralizing user management, ensuring the highest levels of security, and allowing access to all data for analysis are the keys to success, again difficult to do across the NoSQL-SQL chasm.

What was announced?

As mentioned, Oracle announced the availability of the Oracle Database API for MongoDB. But what does that mean exactly? First, it means that organizations can develop and run their MongoDB workloads in Oracle Autonomous Database or Autonomous JSON Database using MongoDB tools and drivers by simply modifying the connection string with an application to point to the stand-alone database.

In the figure above, you can see Oracle’s Autonomous Database, including three distinct optimizations: transaction processing and mixed workloads; data analysis and warehousing; and JSON document database. Using the Oracle Database API for MongoDB, an organization’s MongoDB environment and associated data would reside in the JSON database or, if a customer prefers, in one of the other variants of the autonomous database. .

The meaning of this is twofold. First, it bridges the tension between an IT organization charged with managing and securing database environments and application development groups that seek speed and simplicity in their processes. Application developers use familiar MongoDB tools, syntax, and schemas and benefit from multi-model and autonomous database automation, while IT enhances the security of MongoDB collections and manages users seamlessly. centralized.

Second, using Oracle Autonomous Database to implement your MongoDB applications and data makes it easy to share and analyze data across the enterprise. And really, that’s what matters to business users. As an analyst working in a business unit, I want to use my proven business intelligence (BI) tools to glean insights from my data, regardless of its location or format: document collections or relational tables. And that’s the big win for customers – a shorter time to more informed information.

So, as you can see in the figure above, this service allows business users to access and analyze data generated from MongoDB-based applications through the SQL tools and solutions they are already familiar with. .

Bigger than an API

This announcement from Oracle is significant and offers real benefits to the company. Without a doubt. But for me, there’s a bigger message – it’s about Oracle’s transformation from a database company to a cloud company with world-class data management capabilities and equally SaaS applications. world class.

Just a few years ago, Oracle was still betting on license fees for its RDMS offering. Every company had (and probably still has) an Oracle footprint supporting a mission-critical application — and they were paying a hefty fee. Since then, Oracle Cloud has taken off, designed from the ground up as a cloud services platform for customers of all sizes, with everything from automatic threat detection and remediation with Autonomous Database to applications AI-injected SaaS for ERP, HCM and CX.

If you’re wondering how successful the company has been, check out this Oracle Cloud Lift Services announcement. 1,000+ companies – a list of “who’s who” moving workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

While the company certainly isn’t the size of AWS or Azure yet, I like its approach to the cloud. It offers what it does best: data services. And it does so in an open and collaborative way. I suspect his approach will continue to see double-digit growth.

Final Thoughts

Talk to any enterprise developer about their database of choice, and MongoDB will be among the leaders. It ranks as the fifth most popular database platform and is the most deployed NoSQL distribution in the market.

MongoDB’s popularity in the enterprise can create tension between developers who love its simplicity and performance and IT professionals who struggle with centralized management and summarization of data across the enterprise.

Oracle’s announcement alleviates this tension, to the benefit of key stakeholders. Developers continue to use MongoDB; Enterprise IT is easier to manage, and business users can now access and analyze all enterprise data from the tools they are used to.

In my opinion, Autonomous Database is the API key that MongoDB cannot match. Today, it provides what MongoDB application developers want to become more productive and simplify their lives: automation to reduce or eliminate manual tasks (tuning, patches, scaling, security, etc. ) and in-database access to features such as SQL for analysis. , machine learning and spatial graph.

Developer demand for these features will inevitably force cloud database services to develop and deliver them, but when? So far, MongoDB has shown no sign of fully adopting automation and only a small step in including SQL. If you look at the evolution of Oracle, after forty years of experience in developing its mission-critical database, it culminated in the autonomous database; I guess others will catch up.

Based on a live e-commerce demo I saw of the Oracle Database API for MongoDB, I imagine that enterprise customers will realize the value of this offering. I will be curious to follow the adoption over the next two quarters.

Note: Moor Insights & Strategy writers and editors may have contributed to this article.

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