I recently had the pleasure of writing a review of MongoDB for InfoWorld. For those unfamiliar with MongoDB (or Mongo for short), it’s an “open source, schema-free document store written in C++ that boasts support for a wide array of programming languages, a SQL-like query language, and a number of intriguing features related to performance and scalability”; what’s more, it has excellent documentation and a strong community. The buttress of the community is a commercial company, dubbed 10gen, which provides additional tools and services (for a fee, obviously). Mongo’s document-oriented nature makes a lot of sense for some domains; conversely, there are definitely scenarios where it isn’t a fit. Regardless, there are a number of benefits to Mongo including: Out-of-the-box scalability and availability with sharding and replica sets Support for wide array of programming languages via drivers Excellent documentation, including a number of published books Ad hoc queries similar to SQL Strong community and commercial support On the flip side, some disadvantages to Mongo are: No ACID transactions Lack of deep security features BI tool integration lagging (although Jaspersoft supports Mongo) Queries don’t support joins between collections For more details, check out my article dubbed “Flexing NoSQL: MongoDB in review“; moreover, you might find these other resources helpful: Java development 2.0: MongoDB: A NoSQL datastore with (all the right) RDBMS moves An introduction to MongoDB (video) Eliot Horowitz on MongoDB (podcast) So what are you waiting for? Stop reading this and click a link, baby! Java