In an earlier post, I mentioned that MongoDB is the one component of our architecture that I was a little unsettled with. Mongo is new and different, which can be good for many things, but with your database manager, you usually want something a little more established. It was first released in early 2009 so it's only been around for about 2 years. And it's not your traditional relational, SQL-based datastore. The whole document-based storage paradigm is new to most of us.
But...two recent events have me really stoked about MongoDB. First, Grails recently announced support for Mongo under the GORM framework. This is just awesome. It means that the Grails community recognizes Mongo as a popular and viable datastore. Adding GORM support makes Mongo a first-class citizen in the Grails world so now you can treat it just like all the other relational datastores that Grails supports under Hibernate.
Second, our company attended the MongoDC conference held in Washington D.C. last week. Sponsored by 10gen and Intridea, the conference brought together MongoDB experts and users. It's always good to know who the experts are, but it was really cool to see how many other folks are on the Mongo wagon these days. And it's not like MongoDC was the only conference this year...10gen has run several already this year and more are on the schedule. At the after-party, we were talking to Mathias (one of the presenters and a developer at 10gen) and he said that he's presented at "about 7 or 8" this year.
So the moral of this story is that Mongo is alive and well. Community support is a great thing. It certainly feels like Mongo is going to be a player for long time. If you're wondering if a NoSQL DB is right for you, take a look at the use cases that Mongo is well suited for.
