What advantages does MongoDB have over common SQL databases, such as Oracle?
Many questions you will be asked during an interview will ask you to compare two or more items. Interviewers will use these types of questions for several reasons. First, they help to confirm your knowledge of the topics. Second, it enables them to understand your preferences. And finally, they can determine whether you are familiar with the processes or technology used by their organization. Reviewing the terms, concepts, and processes used in your job and researching the company to understand what technologies the employer utilizes will help you be prepared to respond to these types of questions.
"Most SQL databases use very formal structures including tables, rows, columns and records to store and retrieve data. While this is easy to organize and manage, it is not very flexible. On the other hand, MongoDB uses a flexible structure that allows it to be modified and extended, based on the requirements of the data and the queries used by the program."
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Anonymous Answer
In a MongoDB collection, data is stored as documents that have a JSON-like structure and can be queried in the same way. This allows for a flexible data and query structure and nested data with no need for a rigid tabular schema like SQL relational database. The data can be structured specifically to meet the needs of the application and less data transformation is needed before adding to the database. MongoDB databases can be distributed across multiple nodes - this increases availability and enables horizontal scaling (e.g in a cloud computing environment) to handle a large volume of data - SQL databases only allow vertical scaling (increasing resources on one machine on which database runs).
Marcie's Feedback
Great. You clearly list multiple advantages that MongoDB has over common SQL databases. Can you think of a real-life situation when you've used MongoDB instead of a SQL database and explain why you made this choice? Although these questions are testing your technical knowledge, you always want to personalize them as much as possible.
