7 frequent challenges with MongoDB
and how Couchbase avoids them
Organizations that experiment with MongoDB struggle in many areas, but those that eventually switched to Couchbase repeatedly report seven common pitfalls that we help them overcome. Below is a summary of those challenges, along with a description of how Couchbase avoids those issues.
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Challenge #1: MongoDB is hard to scale from a single replica set to a fully sharded environment
Due to its “master-slave” architecture, MongoDB requires a complex process, with lots of moving parts and manual configuration, to scale from a single replica set to a fully sharded environment.
How Couchbase Avoids this Problem
Unlike MongoDB, Couchbase has a modern, masterless, elastic architecture with a single node type. Scaling Couchbase on demand is a simple, push button process — add nodes and rebalance data with a few clicks, and you’re done.
Challenge #2: MongoDB’s performance rapidly degrades with increasing users
MongoDB’s architecture limits its ability to efficiently support many concurrent users with a single node. Beyond a few dozen concurrent users on a node, performance rapidly degrades. So the only way to effectively deal with performance degradation is to add more hardware resources, which increases costs and complexity of your deployment.
How Couchbase Avoids this Problem
Couchbase is designed to efficiently handle large numbers of concurrent users. Couchbase easily supports hundreds of concurrent users on a single node with little to no impact on performance.
Challenge #3: MongoDB is significantly susceptible to data loss and inconsistency
The way MongoDB handles replication and failover (by promoting “secondaries” to “primaries” automatically) can result in lost writes and inconsistency reads. So if a primary goes down, MongoDB is likely to suffer data loss or inconsistency. This risk is one reason why MongoDB deployments need to be closely monitored at all times.
How Couchbase Avoids this Problem
Couchbase, which was purpose-built for distributed environments, has an entirely different approach to replication and failover that significantly reduces the potential of data loss and inconsistency. With Couchbase, failover is controlled to prevent two nodes from accepting reads or writes of the same data at the same time.
Challenge #4: MongoDB requires a third-party cache to help it perform
Because MongoDB cannot handle many connections and many concurrent users per node, companies often need to add a dedicated third-party cache to help MongoDB meet their performance requirements. The need for a third-party cache can add both cost and complexity to a MongoDB deployment.
How Couchbase Avoids this Problem
Couchbase has a fully integrated managed object cache that completely removes the need for a third-party cache. In fact, Couchbase leverages the memcached protocol, which is widely regarded as a high performance cache.
Challenge #5: When deployed in multiple geographies, MongoDB can’t perform all writes locally
Due to its master-slave architecture, and its use of “primaries” and “secondaries”, MongoDB cannot perform all writes locally when it’s deployed across multiple datacenters in different geographies. This means it has to perform at least some writes to remote locations, which can increase latency and degrade application performance.
How Couchbase Avoids this Problem
Couchbase’s masterless, distributed architecture, and its built-in support for cross datacenter replication, means that all writes can be performed locally rather than to a remote location. This capability minimizes latency to help optimize application performance.
Challenge #6: MongoDB lacks a mobile solution
MongoDB does not have a complete solution to support mobile applications. As a result, you have to write custom services for your mobile apps to access data in MongoDB. And you either have to write your own code to synchronize data on the mobile device with data in a remote server, or forego synchronization and instead pull data from the remote server for every request — which means your app always needs an Internet connection to work properly.
How Couchbase Avoids this Problem
Couchbase provides a complete mobile solution — Couchbase Mobile — that includes an embedded JSON database (Couchbase Lite) and a pre-built synchronization solution (Sync Gateway). So you can use Couchbase to easily build mobile apps that always work, with or without an Internet connection.
Challenge #7: MongoDB is time-consuming to manage and maintain
Due to its master-slave architecture, the topology of a MongoDB deployment can be complex and increasingly complicated as you try to scale it. Deploying MongoDB requires lots of manual configurations and includes numerous components: routers, config servers, arbiters, primary instances, secondary instances.
How Couchbase Avoids this Problem
Couchbase’s masterless, distributed architecture is elegantly simple. Installing Couchbase and setting up a cluster is a fast and easy process, with minimal components and configuration requirements. A multi-node Couchbase cluster can be set up in minutes, and adding or removing nodes is a simple, push-button process.
