In 2007, the company, 10gen, began developing MongoDB (the database’s unique name is derived from the word, humongous), a document-oriented open source database. After being published two years later, it quickly gained notoriety in the IT world and is now one of the most popular NoSQL databases. Today 10gen, which has since been renamed, MongoDB Inc., is still responsible for continuing the software’s development; it also manages sales for commercial enterprise solutions.
MongoDB is written in the programming language, C++, and saves data in BSON format, which was modeled after the JSON format (JavaScript Object Notation). Thanks to this latter aspect, all JavaScript datatypes are supported, which is why MongoDB presents a great choice for the Node.js platform. MongoDB databases contain one or multiple collections of data, and these are able to manage any amount and many different types of data fields.
Establishing a connection to MongoDB’s database can be done in several different ways. Most distributions generally contain the mongo shell, a client that enables access via command line. Additionally, a HTTP-based administration interface can also be activated and called up in the browser. What’s more, most user interfaces, like MongoChef, Robomongo, or Mongoclient allow data to be edited and depicted graphically. MongoDB runs on almost every current version of Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.