As enterprises increasingly depend on MongoDB to build and run modern applications, they need high-quality analytics solutions to match MongoDB's powerful data model. With the partnership Teradata and MongoDB just announced, they just got one. And it's exceptionally cool. With data analytics leader Teradata we've built a bi-directional connector that gives organizations interactive data processing at extremely fast speeds.

Teradata's bi-directional QueryGrid connector allows Teradata customers to integrate massive volumes of JSON with cross-organizational data in the data warehouse for high performance analytics. Through the connector, MongoDB customers will have access to JSON that has been enriched by Teradata to support rapidly evolving applications for mobile, Internet of Things, eCommerce, social media and other applications.

In other words, users will soon be able to easily connect MongoDB applications and analytics running on Teradata.

The Future Is JSON

For the past 40 years, enterprises have stored their data in the tidy-but-rigid tables and joins of relational databases. Given the explosion of unstructured data, however, enterprises need a more expressive, flexible way of describing and storing data.

Enter JSON.

MongoDB stores data in JSON documents, which we serialize to BSON. JSON provides a rich data model that seamlessly maps to native programming language types, and the dynamic schema makes it easier to evolve one's data model than with a system that enforces schemas like a relational database (RDBMS). Marrying MongoDB's operational database with Teradata's analytics platform a great way to bring together all of an enterprise's data.

A Virtuous Cycle

One way of thinking about the interaction between MongoDB and Teradata is to picture a crowd of people. MongoDB interacts with individuals within the crowd in real-time while Teradata looks for patterns within the crowd. With this connector, organizations can push their MongoDB data (website clicks, purchases, etc.) into Teradata, which runs queries against the data, looking for patterns. This intelligence is then pushed back to MongoDB, enriching the interaction with individual eCommerce buyers, mobile users, etc.

It's a virtuous cycle, as Teradata describes on its blog. Here's what this looks like for an eCommerce application:

By bringing the two together, an eCommerce vendor's interactions with its customers will continuously improve as their MongoDB-based application gets smarter and more tailored by Teradata analytics. Importantly, for enterprises that expect to use both relational databases and MongoDB, Teradata's JSON integration unifies relational and MongoDB data analysis.

And, Not Or

This last point is worth repeating. As much as enterprises might wish to shed their IT investments and start over, the reality is that they can't and won't, as a 2012 Gartner analysis found:

By giving organizations an easy way to connect MongoDB's operational data with Teradata's enterprise data warehouse, the two organizations ensure existing and new data sources can coexist. By working closely together, MongoDB and Teradata give enterprises the best of a modern, operational database with a powerful analytics platform.