Question

So I have done some research and found out that MongoDB doesn’t do fsync(), which means that when you tell the database to write something, the database might tell you it’s written, although it’s not. Isn’t this going against CRUD?

If I’m correct, are there any good reasons for this?

Answer 1

The reason is performance. Without having to write to disk on each change, MongoDB can handle updates faster.

MongoDB tells you when updates have been delivered to the server, not when the updates have been written, as you can read in the documentation on Verifying Propagation of Writes with getLastError:

Note: the current implementation returns when the data has been delivered to [the] servers. Future versions will provide more options for delivery vs. say, physical fsync at the server.

This is going against ACID, more specifically against the D, which stands for durability:

Durability [guarantees] that once the user has been notified of a transaction’s success the transaction will not be lost, the transaction’s data changes will survive system failure, and that all integrity constraints have been satisfied, so the DBMS won’t need to reverse the transaction.

ACID properties mostly apply to traditional RDBMS systems. NoSQL systems, which includes MongoDB, give up on one or more of the ACID properties in order to achieve better scalability. In MongoDB’s case durability has been sacrificed for better performance when handling large amounts of updates.

---

MongoDB and ACID

Most ACID properties are guarantees at transaction level. A transaction is usually a group of queries that should be treated as a single unit. MongoDB has no concept of transactions, again for performance reasons. Therefore most ACID properties don’t apply to MongoDB.

A — Atomicity states that a transaction should either succeed or fail. It is not allowed to partially succeed; if part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction should be rolled back. MongoDB supports atomic operations on a document level, but not on a ‘transaction’ level.

C — Consistency partially refers to atomicity, but also includes referential integrity. A relational database is responsible for making sure that all foreign key references are valid. MongoDB has no concept of foreign keys, so this ACID property doesn’t apply.

I — Isolation states that two concurrent transactions are not allowed to interfere with each other; if two transactions try to modify the same data, the second transaction has to wait for the first one to complete. To achieve this, the database will lock the data. MongoDB has no concept of locking, so it doesn’t support isolation for multiple operations¹⁾. Single operations are isolated.

D — Durability is described above. MongoDB doesn’t support true durability (yet), in terms of ACID-ic durability.

Now, you may think that MongoDB is useless compared to RDBMS systems because it lacks transactions and most ACID guarantees. However, part of the reason that transactions exist is that relational databases need to treat certain data as a single entity, but this data has been normalized into multiple tables.

MongoDB allows you to store your data as a single entity. This removes the need for foreign keys and referential integrity in most cases. You also don’t need multi-query transactions, because you don’t need multiple tables to update a single entity. Most of the times you only have to update a single document, and these operations are atomic in MongoDB.

¹⁾ According to the first comment on this page, db.eval() provides isolation for multiple operations. However, according to the documentation you usually want to avoid the use of db.eval().