Feature
IBM’s DB2 database and MongoDB are getting together. This week, IBM and Mongo’s parent, 10gen, announced collaboration on a new standard to make it easier for companies to implement data-intensive apps for the Web and for mobile devices.
The popular open source MongoDB utilizes NoSQL database technology, is commonly used for mobile and Web apps, and has been downloaded by about four million developers. It is ranked as 7th in database popularity, compared to DB2 at 5th place.
Database World, Mobile Apps
Through the collaboration, developers will be able to use IBM Eclipse tools with IBM Worklight Studio to integrate MongoDB APIs using the MongoDB query language. By utilizing MongoDB’s query language, developers can more easily query JSON documents in DB2. JSON documents are popular for storing Web-based data.
Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM WebSphere, said in a statement that, by supporting MongoDB, IBM is “marrying the database world with the new world of mobile app development,” better enabling enterprise mobile apps to “leverage the vast data resources managed by organizations around the world.”
10gen CEO Max Schireson pointed out to news media that IBM has a history of playing “a critical role in bringing important new technologies to the enterprise,” such as the relational database, SQL or Linux. More recently, IBM is playing a major role in facilitating the adoption of OpenStack open source cloud technologies.
NoSQL Movement
IBM said it will also assist the MongoDB community by contributing expertise in security and international languages toward the standard. A key goal is that, by third quarter of this year, developers will be able to pair IBM’s WebSphere eXtreme Scale data grid platform with MongoDB, as well as be able to run MongoDB apps directly on DB2.
The NoSQL database movement developed in response to the flood of many kinds of data -- much of it unstructured -- from the Web, mobile devices and other sources. In contrast to SQL relational databases, for instance, a NoSQL DB allows data to be added without a predefined schema and enables a wider range of possibilities for scaling up.
