Disadvantages of MongoDB

Despite MongoDB’s many strengths, it also carries a few drawbacks that warrant consideration. Some drawbacks are:

• Limited Transactions Scope: In MongoDB, transactions work within each piece of data (called a document), but they don’t fully cover situations where you need to do multiple things at once across lots of data. This might be tricky for applications that really need everything to happen perfectly together.

• Lacks in Full ACID Compliance: While MongoDB offers Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) at the document level, it doesn’t provide full ACID compliance across multiple documents or collections. This limitation can be challenging for applications requiring strict and complex transactional guarantees.

• Limited Join Capabilities: Unlike traditional relational databases, MongoDB doesn’t support joins in the same way. While it’s possible to manually perform join-like operations using code, it can slow down execution and affect performance.

• Data Redundancy and Memory Usage: MongoDB stores key names with each value pair, causing some data redundancy due to the limitations of joins. This redundancy might lead to increased memory usage compared to what’s strictly necessary.

• Document Size Limit: MongoDB imposes a maximum document size limit of 16 MB. Larger documents might need to be handled differently or divided into smaller documents to fit within this constraint.
• Nested Document Levels: Document nesting in MongoDB is possible but limited to a maximum of 100 levels. This restriction can impact how deeply you can organize and structure your data within documents.

MongoDB is a powerful database that’s great at handling lots of data and making sure it’s always available. It uses a flexible way of storing data called documents and collections. As a business grows – it can handle more and more data without slowing down. However, it’s worth noting that MongoDB is licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL), which some consider as not entirely free to use, but despite this, it’s widely adopted by companies worldwide across various industries. Its high performance, availability, and scalability make it available for many businesses looking for a robust database engine.