With support of multi-document ACID transactions in MongoDB, is MongoDB now suitable for financial applications? [closed]

Question

MongoDB now support multi-document ACID Transactions.

With this update, is it safe to say that MongoDB can now be used for financial applications involving financial transactions such as payments?

What are people's thoughts on this?

It has some institutions as customers, but they don't seem to be using it for financial transactions.

Androecium

It's not because you have ACID that you're safe for financial apps (you also have to use it properly in your code...). Most app that don't use ACID do it for scalability reasons. You also have other safe tx models without ACID. I remember talks and presentation about Ebay running w/o transactions, by design. But I guess, yes, it's reassuring to have ACID for stakeholders at least, I'm wondering how's MongoDB scalability with ACID transactions. – Levitical

Answer 1

No, it is not safe to say that MongoDB can now be used for financial applications involving financial transactions such as payments.

The thing is, maybe it is OK for your situation and maybe it is not. It is largely a matter of opinion, regulations, and how much risk you are willing to take. That why it is not safe to make a blanket statement calling MongoDB "safe".

Some financial applications, such as banking or securities (stock) trading, have strong regulatory requirements regarding such things as security and auditability, and just because a database claims ACID compliance does not mean it meets these regulations, or that even if it does meet the requirements, it has been certified in a way acceptable to the regulators. ACID compliance is new to MongoDB, so there is a definite possibility of bugs causing data loss, just as there were in previous versions. While of course any database might have bugs, commercial ACID relational databases like Oracle and DB2 have a much longer and better track record of not loosing data, so depending on your financial application, MongoDB might not be acceptably reliable.

I could go on listing more and more considerations, but the point is there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Pinterest apparently stopped using MongoDB not just because of problems with cluster migration, but because they thought the supporting toolset was not sufficient for them to diagnose and resolve issues quickly and easily enough. That was a long time ago and surely things have gotten better, but does MongoDB have adequate tools to repel, detect, and recover from a state-sponsored attacker who wants to steal the billion dollars in assets your database is responsible for? Probably not.

Soffit

Answer 2

Yes it is. If you check https://www.mongodb.com/industries/financial-services financial institutions are using mongoDB. And it does support scaling. https://www.mongodb.com/collateral/mongodb-multi-document-acid-transactions

If you see trend mongoDB has been developing features of RDBMS in past in 3.4 they added Views They also added mongosqld for business intelligence.

Earlier people were hesitant to use mongoDB where they required ACID transactions. But now they can rely on it. The overhead of ACID transaction is also negligible but yes it will depend on the developer to ensure that he has coded accordingly

Incumber

I dont know why you got voted down as there has been legitimate uses cases for Mongodb in financial areas as provided in the mongo link you gave. Though really comes down to the team implementing it....like anything else – Greatcoat