The project I’m working on at the moment has a lot of analytics data. This means there’s a lot of inserts and updates in the database and queries have to be fast! At the moment all of this is hosted in a single MS SQL Server which does a pretty decent job. Still, this seems like a perfect scenario to introduce a noSQL database, especially as we are migrating to the cloud to improve performance of the application as a whole.

After a having reviewed a couple of noSQL databases, our weapon of choice became MongoDB. It’s popular, fast and there are a couple of providers which offer it as a hosted solution.

While reviewing MongoDB I discovered you not only need to change your ‘scheme’, but also the way you query the database. I have spent quite some hours on finding out why the performance was so incredibly slow, therefore it seems like a good idea to share my findings.

To make life easier, the most important stuff to set up a connection to a MongoDB store is thread safe. This is great as you don’t have to setup a connection to MongoDB every time you want to use it. In my testing code I’ve set up some static properties to keep the connection alive.