Market Research Firm YouGov Relies on MongoDB’s Scalability and ’Superior Performance’, Upgrade to MongoDB 3.0 Delivers Significant Cost Savings by Reducing Storage requirements by 70%
MongoDB today announced that YouGov, one of the world’s leading market research organisations, relies on MongoDB to reduce time to market and improve user experience.
YouGov engages in a continuous conversation with millions of consumers to better understand opinions, behaviours and preferences. To collect this large volume of data, YouGov built a platform called Gryphon using an internal database known as FastStore. Realising that the system would need to scale globally, YouGov migrated from FastStore to MongoDB in 2010. MongoDB’s ease of development increased the pace YouGov could deliver services into production.
MongoDB is now the default non-relational database for YouGov, used for dozens of applications within the company. YouGov has experienced a 70% reduction in storage capacity by migrating to the latest release, MongoDB 3.0, which resulted in a significant cost saving.
“I had been thinking about how to solve this non-relational data problem for years, then in 2010 when I saw MongoDB, the light bulb came on. I knew we had to use it,” said Jason R. Coombs, Executive Technical Director at YouGov, Plc. “Performance issues due to operating at scale were completely eliminated when we migrated to MongoDB. The implementation is dramatically simpler, which means our developers can focus more time on producing higher value applications.”
Gryphon ingests all of YouGov’s global survey data into MongoDB, with each document capturing a user’s response and activity during an interview session. Then the data is served to YouGov’s suite of products, such as BrandIndex, a brand perception tool, or Pulse, a consumer behaviour tracker. YouGov considered migrating to Microsoft SQL Server, but it could not provide the speed of innovation or performance required. YouGov then went into production with MongoDB in 2010, making it one of the first large scale deployments of the database.
“MongoDB has many times shown its superiority in performance, which directly impacts our customer experience and engagement. There is also no doubt that there are some applications we would not have built had it not been for MongoDB. It removes much of the complexity developers and ops teams face as new apps are built and rolled out,” explained Jason.
YouGov uses MongoDB Enterprise Advanced a version of MongoDB that includes advanced software, support, certifications, and licenses. With a global cluster of five shards, two in the US and two in Europe, the operations team relies on MongoDB Cloud Manager to run, automate and backup the deployment.
“While MongoDB has evolved considerably since 2010, as has our own expertise, we continue to rely on the support that comes with MongoDB Enterprise Advanced. It’s less about break and fix support, and more about proactive, consultative services and tools – such as planning upgrades or advice on schema design for new apps,” concluded Jason.
Joe Morrissey, VP of EMEA MongoDB said: “MongoDB is ideally suited for organisations like YouGov. Teams who spend every day challenging assumptions about how things should be done, to color outside of the lines and identify smart, efficient solutions to everyday problems.
“Seeing one of our earliest adopters weave MongoDB into a culture of constant innovation is gratifying. And it’s inspiring to see how that culture is delivering concrete benefits that propel the business forward. It’s a team we could all learn from,”