I am on an iPad mini and too late to pick and choose sites. The quote below is from the November 2016 Computerworld article that Duma linked to.
Important to put it into the context of the conversation we have been having about MongoDB (MDB), including the real world information given by ajm and Tamhas.
Just as I described, the Mongo database is a work in progress and constantly getting better. Yes, this project by Barclays (and remember this is highly regulated Barclays that can go out of business, executives jailed, etc. if something much less worse happened than what happened to Equifax, and every single piece of data is precious and must not be lost) started out as basically a read only cache, mirror image of what was on the mainframe.
The reason for this, is that the best software are servers you can buy (as obviously Barclays had the resources to buy them) were insufficient to meet customer needs in the new age of apps and the East West, always up cloud era.
Thus, they created a read only cache of the mainframe so that customers could get their balance and transaction information without it ever going down. A big problem in the entire banking industry that regulators are getting on their tails about. And pisses me off as well. It may have something to do with running Safari on Mac, but I am not able to access one of my 3 major accounts at least 1x a week or so. And sometimes this is business critical.
Anyways, as the below indicates, Barclays is now planning (and I am sure it is now up and running) to stop just mirroring the mainframe with the MongoDB, but start using the MongoDB itself as the front facing data vehicle for clients to get their information. In fact, it sounds like the mainframe will now become the backup, and that it worked so well that the Mongo is now the lead database. Don’t beliveve me, read it for yourself.
But the article goes on (I did not paste it for reasons stated above) that more than this, that the MongoDB creates even more capabilities. Have you ever noticed in your bank account that when you go to look at transaction data you get maybe a few days, a week, or a month at most. And then you can customize the date range? Turns out that is a consequence of SQL database shortcomings. The SQL technology is overtaxed by all that data! No Tamhas, not making this up.
However, by using the MongoDB (yes, and I am sure many other open source NoSQL data bases can do it as well, and maybe Hadoop as well (but I know little about this type of database) 100s or thousands of transactions can be accessed at a time remotely by the customer with no drain on the systems!
Further, beyond this, Barclays is talking about making such data available to access through Facebook, et al.
To go even further, Barclays is also talking about more personalized marketing. With the NoSQL, more data can be managed, enabling marketing to individuals to be more individual as it analyzes the data (or more likely machine learning type results).
I mean, WHO KNEW THAT SQL DATABASES WERE THAT LIMITING! Well, now we do.
And btw/ on marketshare of NoSQL databases - from a different source - Mongo has 1/3 or more of the dollar value marketshare for NoSQL databases. That is of course a picture in time, and can change, but NoSQL total revenues was round $370 million, Hadoop around $320 million. That would give Mongo ~1/3 or more total marketshare by dollar. So please, don’t tell me that utterly enormous mindshare is not translating into dollar usage either, even this early in the market.
Finally, all of this was done without the 4.0 multiple document beta. Yes, yes, disclaimer, it might suck! Got it. It might not either. And it will constantly get better.
So the quote I pulled out is as follows, but the information above mostly comes from the Computer World article Duma linked to from late 2016. You can see from the above, and below, just how quickly use cases for MongoDB are being found and growing. Yes, yes, NoSQL databases in general and that market is lead, it appears, by dollar and mindshare by Mongo But the quote below:
Chandrasekaran said that the bank is quickly expanding the use of the ODS platform. This means using it as the “first port of call” for customer data, rather than just as backup for mainframe systems as had initially been intended.
One example he gave was serving up data for online and mobile banking ‘landing pages’. This is one of the most intensive data procedures that the bank will have to perform - querying personal accounts, savings and mortgage databases at once, for instance - and occurs every time a customer logs in to access digital banking services.
“We are hitting the mainframe five million times a day for one of the heaviest queries,” he said.
Instead, Barclays plans to hold the customer data in the ODS platform, allowing it to be retrieved in close to real-time when a customer reaches the landing page.
“[With MongoDB] It is a single lookup and that makes it faster, simpler and extremely cheaper.”. <<<MY EMPHASIS - EXTREMELY CHEAPER. NOT JUST CHEAPER.>>>
This has meant a departure from the initial aim of essentially providing back up to mainframes, and instead benefiting from the advantages of the NoSQL technology.
He said: “What we started off as a resilience use case we are now also making a mainframe offload use case. This is currently in progress and we are hoping to go live by Q2 next year.”
But perhaps Mongo is defrauding everyone when they are making their marketcase, and Barclays is a fluke thing and an experiment, static as it will never expand or improve, and Barclays is willing to put it reputation on the line, and face legal jeopardy with regulators, by moving data intensive mission critical functions from the more expensive, legacy, SQL servers just to save an “extreme” number of dollars.
Tinker