Overview of MongoDB

MongoDB represents a radical and much needed departure from relational database technology. Dr. Edgar F. Codd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd), an English computer scientist working for IBM, published his seminal paper, A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks in 1970. It formed the basis for what we now know as RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems), using SQL (Structured Query Language), adopted by IBM, Relational Software (later Oracle), and Ingres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database), a research project at the University of California in Berkeley. Ingres, in turn, spawned Postgres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and others.

The first version of MongoDB was introduced in 2009 by 10gen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB_Inc.#History) (later MongoDB Inc.) to address a crying need not addressed by the current stable of RDBMS systems, which were, for the most part, based on almost 50-year-old technology; handling big data and modeling objects. Initially proprietary, MongoDB was later released as open source.