What is MongoDB and what is it used for?
MongoDB is a database that stores information in flexible documents instead of rigid tables, and it is used as the operational database of applications that also need text search and vector search.
Each record is a document, and the model does not depend on tables with fixed columns. MongoDB runs in two ways: on MongoDB Atlas, a managed service that operates on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, or installed by the company itself, in the free Community Edition or the commercial Enterprise Advanced.
Besides storing and querying documents, it does aggregations, text search and vector search in the same database. In vector search, embeddings sit in the same document as the operational data, with no separate vector database, which serves AI applications. To grow, MongoDB distributes data across servers through sharding, and there are multi-document transactions on replica sets and sharded clusters.
The vendor publishes list prices for Atlas and treats Enterprise Advanced as priced on request.






