MonetDB Reviews & Insights

It is currently being used in Customer Service and Central Monitoring Station. We currently use it for our scheduling and Forecasting needs, as well as publishing and editing time. I use it about sixty to seventy hours a week personally and have 10 supervisors who use it on a daily basis as well.

I think for what we use it for, mainly scheduling, forecast and to compare against payroll, it works well. I think there are some other things that could be added to it to use, like more expansive ways to use the forecasting tool and an easier way to pull previous data from prior years. This would help making the forecast for scheduling in the future.

MonetDB is used for storing relational or star schema based data in our organization. For the engineering team, it has been a high performance data warehouse option for loading data from Hadoop or Postgres and then running ad-hoc queries to validate results. We have also used it to generate summary reports for our executives and as a backend database to support REST API calls. Being a columnar based database, it returns results in sub-second range and therefore, we tend to run one-off queries involving relational joins of big tables. If you want to experiment with a columnar database or compare with other similar tools such as Redshift, this would be a perfect open source database to do so. In fact, being open source you can download and view the source code anytime.

MonetDB is great when you are performing adhoc queries on a large set of data. For example, if you store data in a typical RDBMS such as MySQL or Postgres and want to join large tables for analytics but the query runs unacceptably slow then MonetDB can act as a second database to offload complex queries. Based on my experience, it may not be a production-ready database since there aren't many DBAs familiar with it and due to lack of documentation, maintenance can become a little tricky.