Event Store vs MongoDB: What are the differences?
Introduction:
In this Markdown code, we will discuss the key differences between Event Store and MongoDB. Event Store and MongoDB are both popular databases but differ in their functionality and features. The following paragraphs will outline the main differences between the two.
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Data Storage Approach: Event Store is an event sourcing database that focuses on capturing, storing, and replaying events. It organizes data as a sequence of events, which can be thought of as a log of changes over time. On the other hand, MongoDB is a document-oriented database that stores data in collections of JSON-like documents. It provides flexible schema design and supports complex querying.
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Data Consistency: Event Store emphasizes strong data consistency through optimistic concurrency control and optimistic locking. It ensures that events are stored and applied in the correct order, maintaining data integrity. In contrast, MongoDB provides eventual consistency by default, allowing immediate write operations but potentially resulting in eventual synchronization delays.
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Event Stream Processing: Event Store enables event-driven architectures by providing powerful stream processing capabilities. It allows subscribing to event streams, enabling real-time processing and event-driven workflows. MongoDB, on the other hand, lacks built-in event stream processing features and primarily focuses on data storage and retrieval.
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Transaction Support: Event Store offers transaction support, allowing atomic and consistent updates within an aggregate or a stream of events. It ensures that multiple changes applied together are treated as a single atomic unit. MongoDB also supports transactions but with some limitations, like no multi-document transactions in sharded clusters prior to MongoDB 4.2.
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Horizontal Scalability: Event Store is designed for distributed architectures and supports horizontal scalability out of the box. It leverages clustering and replication to handle high loads and fault tolerance. MongoDB also provides horizontal scalability through sharding, allowing data partitioning across multiple servers to scale read and write operations.
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Data Model Flexibility: Event Store imposes a stricter structure by organizing data as a stream of events, focusing on capturing domain events and state changes. MongoDB, on the other hand, provides more flexibility in data modeling, allowing the storage of documents with varying structures within the same collection.
In Summary, Event Store differentiates itself by its event-driven approach, strong consistency, and stream processing capabilities, while MongoDB offers flexibility in data modeling, eventual consistency, and broader adoption in various use cases.