Document versioning for MongoDB

Abstract

Data versioning is required in various business and science contexts, including governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and is essential for security audits, legal compliance and business strategy development. We present a data versioning library for MongoDB to support an innovative enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) which aims to be flexible and adapt to changing business needs. We exploit the fact that the volume of archival data is orders of magnitude larger than of the currently valid documents and that historic data is rarely accessed. Experiments with eight sets of 1 million mutations/queries on 100K of valid documents (average size 2.3 kB), carried out over a period of 60 h on a local PC show stable average versioning write/read operation performance per document in the range of 12.3/1.2 ms which proves that the solution is viable in an SME scenario.