In today’s data-driven landscape, organizations need fast, reliable access to transactional data—not just for operational use, but to power analytics, customer experiences, and decision-making. However, accessing this data directly from core systems like mainframes or distributed databases can be challenging, costly, or disruptive.

Many enterprises struggle to tap into valuable transactional data due to:

• Performance constraints on core systems
• High costs of direct integration
• Latency issues that delay insights

This is where implementing data replication pipelines becomes a game-changer.

IBM Data Replication offers a robust solution to deliver near real-time data from both mainframe and distributed sources into a variety of targets. MongoDB is now one of the supported targets.

The MongoDB is an open-source, NoSQL document database that stores data in JSON type format.  It is capable of handling ad-hoc queries with query language that is easy to learn and use, supports Load balancing via sharding and offers HA through built-in replication and failover.  A basic element in MongoDB is a document, which is equivalent to a row in a RDMBS, and the documents are grouped into Collections, which is equivalent to a table in a RDBMS.

If you are familiar with IBM Data Replication experience, you will have no issues configuring and operating this new engine. Below we will walk you through the steps to configure your new IBM Data Replication instance for MongoDB in minutes.

Configuring IBM Data Replication for MongoDB

To set up a IBM Data Replication instance against a MongoDB database, you’ll first need a MongoDB user with the right privileges. The user account must be granted the following permissions on the target database:

find, insert, remove, update, createCollection, createIndex, dropCollection, dropIndex, listIndexes, viewUser, hostInfo, serverStatus

CDC simplifies this step by providing a sample script — mongodb-create-role-user.js — located in the <CDC installation directory>/samples folder. You can customize and run this script to create a role with the required privileges and assign it to a new database user.

Configuring an IBM Data Replication instance for MongoDB is not different than other engines. Only a few details to consider. The JDBC configuration URL follows the MongoDB connection string format (refer to MongoDB documentation), with one caveat: the [username:password] portion should be omitted as the credentials should be entered in separate fields of the configuration tool. Any additional connection options of interest, can be included directly in the URL or specified as advanced parameters.

Below are screenshots of configuring IBM Data Replication for MongoDB in GUI mode:

And in Command Line Text mode:

Once the IBM Data Replication instance for MongoDB and running you are ready to map your tables.  When mapping table for replication, please make sure that the target table (i.e MongoDB collection) in the MongoDB database is not empty. It must contain at least one row (i.e MongoDB document), otherwise Management Console won’t be able to complete the table mapping operation successfully.

To obtain more information about IBM Data Replication for MongoDB visit our documentation [link to the docs] or watch a demo.

Conclusion

Setting up IBM Data Replication with MongoDB enables organizations to access transactional data in near real-time, without impacting core systems. This integration empowers teams to leverage MongoDB’s flexibility and scalability, while maintaining consistent, up-to-date data across systems—helping organizations make faster, data-driven decisions with confidence.