MongoDB: A first look
travisswicegood.com
travisswicegood.com
Short answer: it's awesome. Key points:
1. It's fast. Haven't benchmarked it properly yet, but with decent traffic and a decent volume of stored data, it's not showing no signs of problems. Make sure your indexes are correct.
2. Very helpful community. The users mailing list is filled with helpful users and thr 10gen people (who make mongo) are active there too.
3. Very easy to set up and use from PHP. The driver just works after a simple installation.
There are lots of docs to get you started- Google for tutorials with your favorite language. Also, 10gen run conferences of mongo users and the presentations are usually excellent. I'm giving a talk at the London conference on 18 June and I think their is a Paris one too soon.
It's main purpose is to act as a quasi-cache for a bunch of database queries. A couple of batch apps pull chunks of data from a bunch of databases, essentially consolidating and precalculating a bunch of stuff.
The biggest strength we've found so far is that it is schema-less. We're not spending much time thinking about how to organize the data, just getting it and sifting it.
Hope this helps