MongoDB vs PostgreSQL: 8 Critical Differences Learn

PostgreSQL’s manual indexing provides more control over how indexes are created and maintained, which can lead to better performance. The query finds the coordinates of vessels for different amount of timestamps inside the intersection of three different groups of polygons. Only in this case, the average response time is smaller in case of MongoDB and in some cases reduced at half comparing to PostgreSQL. For our point of view, the reason might be that intersection in MongoDB which is achieved by an aggregation of two match operations is more efficient than in PostgreSQL. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a system that vessels use in order to transmit their position and their navigational status in pre-defined time slots.

  • Unlike relational databases, where altering your table is necessary to make any changes, MongoDB is a bit more flexible because it uses the JSON/BSON format.
  • MongoDB is a document database that stores data as key-value pairs in JSON documents.
  • RDBMS is an acronym that stands for Relational Database Management System.
  • MongoDB provides driver support for some of the best database languages like Python, R, Java, Scala, C, C++, C#, Node.js, and many more.
  • The advantage of MQL is that it is specifically designed for handling JSON data, which makes it easier to work with when dealing with complex data structures.
  • This database is available in the cloud on every major cloud provider.

Several modern day problems need to deal with large amounts of spatio-temporal data. As such, in order to meet the application requirements, more and more systems are adapting to the specificities of those data. The most prominent case is perhaps the data storage systems, that have developed a large number of functionalities to efficiently support spatio-temporal data operations.

PostgreSQL is an object-relational database

I hope more LinkedIn users share my enthusiasm, will share their results, and discuss them in this thread. Dynamic schema means you don’t have to define the schema before inserting a document into mongoDB. The conclusion is pretty surprising as there isn’t really anything that MongoDB can do and PostgreSQL can’t.

mongodb vs postgresql which is better

PostgreSQL supports a range of data types, including dates, text, integers, and Booleans. PostgreSQL is a traditional relational database management system with a fixed schema. MongoDB, on the other hand, is the Not Only SQL document database with a non-fixed scheme.

MongoDB vs PostgreSQL: Foreign Key Support

Beyond the core architectural and performance differences between MongoDB and PostgreSQL, there are other key differences. Finding the right database largely comes down to the needs of your system and organization. If scaling is a chief requirement, then a database like MongoDB is a good option. If you need more consistent data, PostgreSQL will be worth considering. Suppose you are building an e-commerce website and you need to store information about products, such as their name, description, price, and availability.

This increases the query types and analytics you can undertake on a database. Data can be stored in fields, arrays, or nested sub documents in JSON documents. As a result, related information may be stored together in a more organized way, ideal for quick query access via MongoDB’s expressive query language. PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is an open-source relational database management system that emphasizes extensibility and SQL compliance. Let’s look at the key features on Postgres to get a better sense of its uses.

Difference Between MongoDB vs PostgreSQL

The same behaviour is observed in the other samples of timestamps for both queries. It offers several index types like B-tree, compound, text, geospatial, hashed, and clustered indexes. On top of this, MongoDB offers support for various programming languages. Idiomatic drivers are available for more than a dozen languages, but the MongoDB community has contributed plenty of others. You can take advantage of real-time aggregation, ad-hoc queries, and rich indexing to give powerful programmatic ways to access and examine data of all structure types.

PostgreSQL, like Linux, is an example of a well-managed open source project. One of the most broadly adopted relational databases, PostgreSQL came out of the POSTGRES project at the University of California at Berkeley starting in 1986 and it has evolved with the times. MongoDB has implemented a modern suite of cybersecurity controls and integrations both for its on-premise and cloud versions. MongoDB adds elements to the document model and the query engine to handle both geospatial and time series tagging of data. This expands the type of queries and analytics that can be performed on a database. Moreover, MongoDB even allows sharding, columnar compression, densification, and gap-filling for time series collections, which makes it easier to work with time series even when there are missing data points.

Challenges of Using MongoDB & PostgreSQL

The two systems store data differently and the concept of “index” is different too. As an example the size of the index on attribute “ship_id” in MongoDB is about 6 GB while in PostgreSQL the size is 3,1 GB. As mentioned above, the data are stored in MongoDB as GeoJSON and the $geometry field contains the coordinates values, latitude and longitude. Because these data are geographical, we create a 2dsphere index type which supports geospatial queries. Respectively, in PostgreSQL we created an index of type GiST on field the_geom which contains the POINT geometry created from latitude and longitude of each record. For high-speed spatial querying, PostgreSQL uses GiST indexes that can be used to index geometric data types.

mongodb vs postgresql which is better

Since MongoDB 4.4, queries implemented against replica sets produce improved and predictable performance through “hedged” reads. These reads are directed to multiple nodes within the replica set until the fastest node replies. On the other hand, MongoDB has eventually become extensible allowing users to create their functions and use them within the framework. It’s equivalent to user-defined functions (UDF) which allow users of relational databases (like PostgreSQL) to extend SQL statements.

PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB terminology and concepts

The document model also has emergent properties that make development and collaboration much easier and faster. The right answer for your needs is based of course on what you are trying to do. Our goal in this article is to mongodb vs postgresql which is better help to explain the personality and characteristics of each of these databases so you can better understand whether it meets your needs. Read our blog for more information on hiring data scientists and software developers.

It’s quite tasking on the memory, as the denormalization process usually results in high memory consumption. MongoDB Atlas performs the same way across the three biggest cloud providers, making migration between multiple clouds easier. Furthermore, PostgreSQL provides data encryption and allows you to use SSL certificates when your data transits through the web or public network highways. PostgreSQL also enables you to implement the client certificate authentication (CCA) tools as an option, and use cryptogenic functions to store encrypted data in PostgreSQL. One major drawback of MongoDB, however, is that you can’t easily join tables.

Introduction to MongoDB

It is a traditional object-relational database that follows the syntax and schema of SQL databases. This means PostgreSQL structures data before them like other traditional RDMS and unlike MongoDB. I did a POC between these a couple of years back and they were pretty neck in neck with synchronous JDBC drivers. When I leveraged the async JDBC driver with Mongo, then MongoDb performance well exceeded past PostGres by 8x. Honestly, these two are  really two different animals with different use cases.