MongoDB BI Connector Options Across ODBC and JDBC

BI professionals celebrated the MongoDB announcement for a new BI Connector in Q4 2015. Now that you have multiple options, let’s understand how each one works.

MongoDB's recent announcement of a new BI Connector is an exciting development to us as purveyors of industry standards for data connectivity. Reliable SQL access to NoSQL is a concept we introduced to the world at MongoDB World in New York City back in 2014, and continue to develop. 

Now that there's another option, let’s look a little further into how each of them work.

Certified MongoDB BI Connectors for ODBC and JDBC

You now have two certified options:

• MongoDB Connector for BI
• Progress DataDirect MongoDB BI Connector

Why Do We Need a BI Connector for MongoDB?

MongoDB is a NoSQL database, making it scalable and flexible for building applications—but the BI ecosystem expects SQL. MongoDB document structures can include deeply nested data that do not have equivalents in the relational model.

To illustrate, we surveyed our base of customers to understand the nature of production MongoDB documents that have BI requirements. The results strongly validate the decision from both MongoDB and Progress DataDirect to provide SQL access.

How Complex Are Your Documents?

In the graph above, the green "yes" bar indicates complexity for BI.

Depth of Array/Document Nesting

In this graph, higher numbers are proportional to greater complexity for BI.

How Does Each Connector Work?

Both the MongoDB, Inc. and Progress DataDirect BI connectors are certified by MongoDB, Inc. and provide normalized SQL access to MongoDB collections for compatibility with existing BI applications. To help contrast the two, I got feedback from MongoDB and put together the chart below to illustrate how each works:

Who Is Using BI Connectors?

From Progress DataDirect, we have hundreds of organizations that have adopted our MongoDB connector. The public references include Killik (ODBC), Microstrategy (ODBC and JDBC), and Tibco Jaspersoft (JDBC).

Here is the slide deck from the most recent webinar featuring Tibco Jaspersoft, who shared their journey with MongoDB BI analytics.

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Let’s Connect

I'd love to connect with you around this, whether you have suggestions or questions. You can grab a trial of our ODBC or JDBC MongoDB BI Connector, or reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.