MongoDB BI Connector Options Across ODBC and JDBC

MongoDB BI Connector Options Across ODBC and JDBC

Posted on March 02, 2016 0 Comments

BI professionals celebrated the MongoDB announcement for a new BI Connector in Q4 2015. Now that you have multiple options, let’s understand how each one works.

MongoDB's recent announcement of a new BI Connector is an exciting development to us as purveyors of industry standards for data connectivity. Reliable SQL access to NoSQL is a concept we introduced to the world at MongoDB World in New York City back in 2014, and continue to develop

Now that there's another option, let’s look a little further into how each of them work.

Certified MongoDB BI Connectors for ODBC and JDBC

You now have two certified options:

Why Do We Need a BI Connector for MongoDB?

MongoDB is a NoSQL database, making it scalable and flexible for building applications—but the BI ecosystem expects SQL. MongoDB document structures can include deeply nested data that do not have equivalents in the relational model.

To illustrate, we surveyed our base of customers to understand the nature of production MongoDB documents that have BI requirements. The results strongly validate the decision from both MongoDB and Progress DataDirect to provide SQL access.

How Complex Are Your Documents?


How complex are your documents?

In the graph above, the green "yes" bar indicates complexity for BI.

Depth of Array/Document Nesting

Depth of array/document nesting?

In this graph, higher numbers are proportional to greater complexity for BI.

How Does Each Connector Work?

Both the MongoDB, Inc. and Progress DataDirect BI connectors are certified by MongoDB, Inc. and provide normalized SQL access to MongoDB collections for compatibility with existing BI applications. To help contrast the two, I got feedback from MongoDB and put together the chart below to illustrate how each works:

 

MongoDB (Q4 2015)

Progress DataDirect (Q1 2014)

Supported Versions

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced 3.2

Free Software Foundation's GNU AGPL v3.0

MongoDB Professional

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced

Known Workloads

Data Visualization (extract)

Data Visualization (extract)

Connect-Live

Operational BI

Data Federation

Deployment

BI Desktop and/or Application Server

BI Connector on Linux Server Node(s)

BI Desktop and/or Application Server

Interface

Postgres xDBC ANSI SQL

DataDirect xDBC ANSI SQL

Fully Embeddable

n/a

Yes

Certification

MongoDB

MongoDB

DataDirect OVS/JVS (includes ISV suites)

Open source

No

No

Client Support

Postgres open source community

Commercial (includes TSANet Multi Vendor Support)


Who Is Using BI Connectors?

From Progress DataDirect, we have hundreds of organizations that have adopted our MongoDB connector. The public references include Killik (ODBC), Microstrategy (ODBC and JDBC), and Tibco Jaspersoft (JDBC).

Here is the slide deck from the most recent webinar featuring Tibco Jaspersoft, who shared their journey with MongoDB BI analytics.

Let’s Connect

I'd love to connect with you around this, whether you have suggestions or questions. You can grab a trial of our ODBC or JDBC MongoDB BI Connector, or reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Sumit Sakar

Sumit Sarkar

Technology researcher, thought leader and speaker working to enable enterprises to rapidly adopt new technologies that are adaptive, connected and cognitive. Sumit has been working in the data access infrastructure field for over 10 years servicing web/mobile developers, data engineers and data scientists. His primary areas of focus include cross platform app development, serverless architectures, and hybrid enterprise data management that supports open standards such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, GraphQL, OData/REST. He has presented dozens of technology sessions at conferences such as Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, Strata Hadoop World, API World, Microstrategy World, MongoDB World, etc.

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