How Small Businesses Can Benefit from Using Open Source Document Databases to Scale Quickly

Scaling quickly is a reasonable goal for businesses, especially during a time when US consumer confidence continues to fall. Right now, SMEs are facing a crunch time where there is a need for effective planning, investing in the right pathways, capturing the market, and building profit.

This is what makes Stealth Techniques for Savvy Project Managers so important. Paying attention to the right software and tools can be one of the biggest factors in successfully scaling and hitting core objectives. Open-source document databases are one resource that can be a huge help for managers for a number of reasons.

1. Making Use of Various Schemas

Being limited by schema will only hamper your ability to scale efficiently and quickly. Thankfully, great open-source document databases have flexible data schemas.

Evolving and dynamic schemas are one of the biggest reasons why you should use MongoDB to develop your business applications, analyze real-time data, and manage content. This means that data structure is not limited to one encoded format. There is no singular architecture that is used to define different documents, so querying and adding new data is not overcomplicated or restrictive. Since scaling will naturally mean that much of your data types will evolve and be varied, you want to be able to make use of agile models and methodologies to adjust accordingly.

This also trickles over to deployment, as you have more leeway in using different data centers or cloud resources. Because of its open-source nature, you have the freedom to create a system that actually conforms to your specific business needs.

2. Creating Solid Data Models

These days, it’s all about Harnessing the Power of Data for Business Success. With proper data strategies, you can optimize business operations, get the full picture of the market, and avoid common challenges like hard-to-access data, data inconsistency, and gaps in data literacy.

When you are able to create solid data models, you can have a better foundation for future planning and solutions for scalability. Key insights, indexing, anomaly identification, projected trends, and project development are just some of the useful benefits you can get from good data modeling. Open-source databases allow you to deploy different types of data models to meet your objectives, whether these are embedded, normalized, polymorphic, or aggregated, among others.

This applies to stakeholders and managers at various stages of execution. Conceptual data models are great for the planning phase, which can then be extended over to the logical or physical data model. These are the main structures used to implement database needs and establish relationships between entities.

3. Better Collaboration

An open-source database is inherently built for collaboration. Because of its structure, different programming languages can be put to use. This can utilize various skill sets among developers who may have their own preferences or programming experience. Aside from those specialties, this type of database is also more accessible to people with varying levels of coding know-how.

Because it is able to cater to these different types of workers, collaboration among teams is simplified and more coordinated. Any changes are also reflected in real-time with little need for physical infrastructure. Making use of resources in this manner is a no-brainer when it comes to prioritizing scaling. Using an agile development process that is less fractured, you are able to minimize error and focus on interoperability and communication.

At the same time, open-source databases are welcoming to different workflows. It allows different team members to automate certain aspects of their work and be able to keep track of different document versions. This means various teams, even if they are remote, will be able to stay aligned and on track.

4. Horizontal Scalability

What makes horizontal scaling so much better is that it manages resources more effectively. This makes scaling more cost-effective without sacrificing the end goal. Because you are no longer limited to a single machine or cluster, you have more fault tolerance. It inherently minimizes risk when you are trying to improve revenue over cost.

MongoDB frontloads this as one of their key features, which you can make use of with sharding. This way, you can increase the workload as needed without having to put more money into infrastructure. Forbes has found that the second most common reason small businesses fail is running out of capital, so being able to slash costs for scaling without cutting corners in performance can be a great benefit.