Extract to MongoDB for analysis

I have a relational database with about 30开发者_运维百科0M customers and their attributes from several perspectives (360). To perform some analytics I intent to make an extract to a MongoDB in order to have a 'flat' representation that is more suited to apply data mining techniques. Would that make sense? Why?

Thanks!

No.

Its not storage that would be the concern here, its your flattening strategy.

How and where you store the flattened data is a secondary concern, note MongoDB is a document database and not inherently flat anyway.

Once you have your data in the shape that is suitable for your analytics, then, look at storage strategies, MongoDB might be suitable or you might find that something that allows easy Map Reduce type functionality would be better for analysis... (HBase for example)

It may make sense. One thing you can do is setup MongoDB in a horizontal scale-out setup. Then with the right data structures, you can run queries in parallel across the shards (which it can do for you automatically):

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Sharding

This could make real-time analysis possible when it otherwise wouldn't have been.

If you choose your data models right, you can speed up your queries by avoiding any sorts of joins (again good across horizontal scale).

Finally, there is plenty you can do with map/reduce on your data too.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MapReduce

One caveat to be aware of is there is nothing like SQL Reporting Services for MongoDB AFAIK.

I find MongoDB's mapreduce to be slow (however they are working on improving it, see here: http://www.dbms2.com/2011/04/04/the-mongodb-story/ ).

Maybe you can use Infobright's community edition for analytics? See here: http://www.infobright.com/Community/

A relational db like Postgresql can do analytics too (afaik MySQL can't do a hash join but other relational db's can).