Updated March 14, 2023
Introduction to DocumentDB vs MongoDB
DocumentDB, which was developed by Amazon in 2019, is a commercial database having fast, reliable, scalable, fully manageable document store and MongoDB compatible database service. It implements the MongoDB 3.6 API and Apache Server 2.0 by emulating the responses. In order to provide maximum throughput and handle high workloads, compute, and storage is decoupled in it. MongoDB, which was developed by MongoDB Inc in 2009, is an open-source document database that stores the data in JSON-like documents. It allows handling large data volumes and provides flexibility to the users in various ways, be it schema, programming languages, operating systems, etc. It uses an excellent query language to filter the data according to the requirement, no matter how nested it is. In this topic, we are going to learn about DocumentDB vs MongoDB in detail.
Head to Head Comparison Between DocumentDB vs MongoDB (Infographics)
Below are the top differences between DocumentDB vs MongoDB
Key Differences between DocumentDB vs MongoDB
Some of the key differences between DocumentDB vs MongoDB showing the detailed description are given below:
- Amazon DocumentDB is an implementation of MongoDB 3.6 API, which supports all the MongoDB workloads. It is basically the clone of version 3.6, which is reimplemented for scale. Though DocumentDB has its own source code and is closed sourced, it is basically implemented for better performance and high throughput for large data sets. So, DocumentDB works great in the case of mission-critical workloads where there is a need for large data sets as compared to MongoDB.
- One of the most important features that the Amazon DocumentDB has implemented is automatic scaling of data, i.e. now the customers can scale from 10GB to 64TB of data as per the requirements without any extra efforts, whereas scaling the data to this extent is quite difficult in MongoDB.
- There are various data types and indices that DocumentDB does not support, like Decimal128 datatype and some case insensitive indices, whereas MongoDB 3.4+ version supports Decimal128, which is quite helpful while working on big numerical calculations.
- Multi-document ACID transactions are supported by MongoDB with snapshot isolation. In contrast, in the case of DocumentDB, previous versions supported only single-document operations. Still, with the launch of the DocumentDB 4.0 version, all the ACID transactions for the multi-statement, multi transaction, and multi-document are supported.
- Amazon DocumentDB does not support any server-side scripting, whereas, on the other hand, Mongo uses the Javascript language for server-side scripting.
- MongoDB supports the use of Triggers (Triggers allow the execution of the database logic and application based on some events or scheduled time). There are basically 3 types of triggers supported by MongoDB: Authentication Triggers, Database Triggers, and Scheduled Triggers, whereas Amazon DocumentDB does not provide the support of Triggers which plays an important role while programming.
- One reason for choosing DocumentDB can be that everything in DocumentDb is kept on AWS. So for some users, who find difficulty in managing databases by themselves on EC2/ EBS, it would be a great choice of choosing DocumentDB as every service is now on AWS, and Amazon manages it by itself.
- MongoDB database supports Sharding (Sharding means distributing the data across multiple machines to support the deployment of large data sets), whereas Amazon DocumentDB supports the distributed storage architecture, which is basically a different approach to scaling than Sharding.
- MongoDB supports the read-only SQL queries with the help of the MongoDB connector, whereas Amazon DocumentDB does not support the SQL.
- Let’s talk about the programming language support. MongoDB provides the support to multiple languages to the user like C, C#, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, D, Dart, Delphi, Go, etc., so the programmer has multiple choices to write the code in. In contrast, Amazon DocumentDB supports a limited number of languages like Java, Javascript (Node.js), Go, Python and PHP, so the programmer is somewhat restricted to learn them in order to use it.
- One of the important features provided by MongoDB is the aggregation pipeline which allows the user to build a pipeline that is composed of data processing stages and filtering and transforming the documents which are coming from the collection. This pipeline provides limitless flexibility to handle any kind of query. On the other hand, DocumentDB allows simple filtering over documents, even missing the basic constructs like ‘count’ and ‘sum’.
- MongoDB provides the facility of Map- Reduce to the users (which is a very important feature in the case of document collection flow), whereas DocumentDB provides no such feature.
Comparison Table between DocumentDB vs MongoDB
Below given is the comparison table showing the head to head differences between DocumentDB and MongoDB:
| Sr.No. | DocumentDB | MongoDB |
| 1. | DocumentDB is a commercial database. | MongoDB is an open-source database. |
| 2. | Amazon DocumentDB does not support server-side scripting. | MongoDB does not support server-side scripting using the language Javascript. |
| 3. | DocumentDB does not support Triggers. | Triggers are supported by MongoDB. |
| 4. | The primary database model of DocumentDB is a Document store. | The primary database model of MongoDB is the Document store. |
| 5. | DocumentDB was developed by Amazon in the year 2019. | MongoDB was developed by MongoDB Inc in the year 2009. |
| 6. | Automatic data scaling is supported in DocumentDB as the users can scale from 10 GB to 64TB without any effort. | Data scaling is somewhat difficult for the users using the MongoDB database. |
| 7. | Amazon DocumentDB latest versions provide the ability to the users to index arrays greater than 2048 bytes. For the existing indexes, one can take advantage of this functionality by recreating it and dropping the previous one. | In MongoDB, the limit of the item in the array remains as 2048 bytes. |
| 8. | Amazon DocumentDB’s server Operating System is hosted. | Supported MongoDB’s server Operating Systems are Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris. |
| 9. | Amazon DocumentDB provides fault tolerance by dividing the storage volumes into 10GB segments which are spread across various disks. It uses the approach of scaling for this. | MongoDB also provides a better fault tolerance ability through MongoDB Replication that allows the system to continue working properly. MongoDB supports Sharding for distributing the load. |
| 10. | Some of the programming languages supported by Amazon DocumentDB are Java, Javascript, Go, Python, PHP. | Some of the programming languages supported by Amazon MongoDB are C, C#, Perl, PHP, Scala, R, Ruby, D, Dart, Smalltalk, Python, Prolog, and many more. |
Conclusion
The above description clearly explains what DocumentDB and MongoDB are and the major differences between the two. Though DocumentDB provides various facilities and is created specially to deal with large data scales and providing maximum throughput, it still lacks many important features which are provided and very well implemented in MongoDB. It depends on the choice of programmer and the requirements to use any of them, and DocumentDB is raising its bar with every release, but as of now, MongoDB is ruling the database world.
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