Is document-level Transaction enough? (in mongodb)

Question

MongoDB documentation and blog describe its transaction capabilities like this.

MongoDB write operations are ACID-compliance at the document level- including the >ability to update embedded arrays and sub-documents automatically.

Now I'm wondering is this "document-level transaction support" enough ? by enough I mean can it be as good as transaction support in old fashioned RDBMSs ?

about the possible duplicate, what i had in mind was a general question, the fact that "is this enough?" for a developer? or not.

Possible duplicate of [How to work around the lack of transactions in MongoDB?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6635718/how-to-work-around-the-lack-of-transactions-in-mongodb) — Thilo, Nov 18 '16 at 05:29
@Thilo ive read that question, what i had in mind was a general question, the fact that "is this enough?" for a developer? or not — Vahid, Nov 18 '16 at 06:54
In that case the question is "too broad" or "primarily opinion-based". There are all kinds of developers and all kinds of applications. — Thilo, Nov 18 '16 at 07:06
to answer in short, No, it is not as good as RDBMS transaction. MongoDB suits in slightly different purpose with different capabilities and is not supposed to be a substitute of RDBMS. — Rahul Kumar, Nov 18 '16 at 22:17

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 21 '16 at 16:30

I'm going to agree with Joshua on this and add my two cents. In the RDBMS world a transaction is very frequently updating multiple normalized data-bearing structures. A robust level of atomicity is required to ensure that changes are committed to all of those structures as a unit, or rolled back as a unit. In MongoDB you would ideally be designing your schema to keep data that logically belongs together housed together in the same document. This makes document-level atomicity perfectly sufficient for your typical document schema.

I'll also agree that neither RDBMS nor MongoDB transaction handling should be your only line of defense against errors and data corruption. For critical data changes that must be atomic you should always check consistency at the code level post-update.

One final thought: In most RDBMS systems, transaction handling does not always map one-to-one to concurrency. Frequently a large transaction can lock an entire table or tables and cause backlogs in response. In MongoDB, document-level ACID compliance in transaction handling pairs well with document-level concurrency available to those using the WiredTiger storage engine. If designed with both in mind your application can be highly concurrent and completely ACID compliant at the document level, giving you a high level of performance and throughput for transactional workloads.

Cheers,

Bill Finch

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 21 '16 at 15:49

Answering this question involves an understanding of schema design in the NoSQL world. If you approach your schema design like you would in an RDBMS, then you will have a very bad time, and not just because of transactions.

If you design your documents properly, however, document level ACID-compliance should be just fine for 99% of use cases. I would even argue that outside that 99% and in that 1% of use cases, you shouldn't be relying on your database for transactions anyways. This would be a really complicated case where you were changing two completely separate things in parallel. Even in an RDBMS if you were doing this, you would always write a verification in code.

One example might be a bulk update for a banking customer that involved them changing their name and doing an address change at the same time. In an RDBMS these are likely to be separate tables. In MongoDB these will both be in the same document. So this fits in the 99%.

A debit to one account and credit to another would be an example that fit into the 1%. You can wrap that in a transaction in SQL, but if you don't write code to verify the writes afterward, you are going to loose your job. You would never rely on the database for that. Same with MongoDB, where these would be two different documents.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 22 '16 at 22:52

Document-level transactions are good, but not enough for real-world applications. in general, you have to think a bit different as in a RDBMS-world, and use "sub-document" and you can solve many situations without collection-wide transactions, but there are enough use-cases, where you definitly need collection-wide transactions. The debit/credit-situation of an account-system is one example... or if you implement a battle-game, where two player fight against each other and the one (winner) gets "resources" from the other (looser)... you have to update the resource-state of both players in parallel or both have to be rolled back, if something failed. This is not handled by MongoDB transactional as in RDBM-systems.

Once again, as others said already: you have to think in objects/document-structure, there you can handle many situations, where document-level-transactions are far enough...

But the collection-wide-transactions are on the roadmap of MongoDB ;-)

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 23 '16 at 00:13

If you are able to include all your logical data in one document, MongoDB is going to be faster and higher performance than a relational database. You must be sure that all your data are going to be written, or not, at the same time (ACID compliant at the document level).

If you are not in a hurry, MongoDB is working hard to get transactions across collections!

Regards, Juan

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 22 '18 at 06:30

Starting from version 4.0 MongoDB will add support for multi-document transactions. So you will have the power of the document model with ACID guarantees in MongoDB.

For details visit this link: https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/multi-document-transactions-in-mongodb?jmp=community

Is document-level Transaction enough? (in mongodb)

5 Answers5