Migration to MongoDB from Existing Key-Value Database Helps Elsevier Scale, Reduce Costs by 55 Percent and Gain Better Insights into the World’s Largest Repository of Scientific Data
MongoDB (Nasdaq: MDB) announced today that the global information analytics business Elsevier has transformed its ability to manage its research assets and build new, intuitive services by switching to MongoDB, the leading modern, general purpose database platform.
Elsevier publishes 17% of the world’s medical and scientific research each year, adding thousands of new items every day to its research platforms including ScienceDirect and Clinical Key as well as iconic books and journals such as The Lancet, Cell and Gray’s Anatomy. The company aims to help institutions and professionals progress science, advance healthcare and improve performance for the benefit of humanity.
To get more value from that research, Elsevier has moved to MongoDB Enterprise Advanced running across multiple regions of AWS cloud to ensure data resilience. Elsevier provides access to a vast body of content that is represented by more than 200 million MongoDB documents and 1.2 billion content assets. To ensure user access is as fast and seamless as possible, MongoDB manages the richly structured metadata for each asset, including title, author, date, abstract, version numbers, distribution rights – all essential attributes needed to power Elsevier’s publishing platform and associated business model.
Ensuring Elsevier’s publications and customers have consistent and powerful access to content is a key priority for the company. With MongoDB at the core of the Elsevier cloud-based platform, the company is able to apply software and analytics that turn its content into actionable knowledge.
Kim Baddeley, Application Architect in Business Technology Solutions at Elsevier, said, “With MongoDB we’ve been able to introduce far greater capabilities to our platform. We can analyse the content in new ways, helping us to build new services, and provide operational insight to the organisation that we were simply unable to expose before.”
Elsevier’s systems serve an average of 50 million API calls per day, reaching 100 million calls during peak publishing cycles. The structure and capabilities of Elsevier’s previous database service caused unnecessary expense and limited business critical data analysis. By switching to MongoDB, Elsevier has maintained performance levels at scale, and has been able to find efficiencies that deliver a 55% cost reduction. The Elsevier team uses MongoDB Ops Manager to monitor and scale their database as simply as possible, while still keeping the data encrypted at rest.
Kim added, “MongoDB seemed an ideal fit as currently our internal data model is based on native document storage, rich query language, and distributed, scale-out design. With MongoDB, our developers can move much faster, creating new services without first having to pre-define database schema.
“Strategically we are looking to embrace software as a service across our entire computing estate, rather than operate everything ourselves. Experience shows us that this helps us move faster and focus on our apps, rather than backend database operations.”
In the future, MongoDB’s database as a service, MongoDB Atlas, will assist Elsevier in passing the responsibility for all of the provisioning, managing, monitoring, and upgrades to MongoDB, freeing up its development team’s bandwidth to focus on meeting the needs of both the business and the scientific community it serves.
Read more about Elsevier’s use of MongoDB in the Leaf in the Wild series: Elsevier Taps MongoDB to Power its Cloud Platforms, Publishing 17% of the World’s Medical and Scientific Research
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals advance healthcare, open science and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support and professional education, including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, more than 38,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray’s Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professionals and business customers across industries. www.elsevier.com
About MongoDB
MongoDB is the leading modern, general purpose database platform, designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers and the applications they build. Headquartered in New York, MongoDB has more than 8,300 customers in over 100 countries. The MongoDB database platform has been downloaded over 45 million times and there have been more than one million MongoDB University registrations.
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