MongoDB Powers Critical eHarmony Compatibility Application Processing 1 Billion Matches Daily

MongoDB Delivers Scalable Matching Capabilities for the Number One Trusted Relationship Services Provider in the U.S.


NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Aug 14, 2013) - 10gen, the MongoDB company, today announced that eHarmony, a pioneer in relationship science technology, selected MongoDB to power a critical application in the company's Compatibility Matching System®, which connects compatible members likely to enjoy a long-term relationship.

At the forefront of big data and machine learning, eHarmony's matching system uses a flow algorithm operating on a massive array of computers to process a billion potential matches every day worldwide. Built on MongoDB, eHarmony's "potential match generator" uses bi-directional, user-defined criteria to match members based on a complex, comprehensive set of traits and preferences.

MongoDB's flexible data model and powerful indexing features enable eHarmony to perform multi-attribute searches to quickly narrow down the number of potential matches for singles. The process of identifying matches was narrowed from 15 days for the entire user pool to 12 hours with MongoDB, a 95 percent reduction in time.

"With our previous, decentralized SQL-based system, the entire user profile set was stored on each server, which impacted performance and impeded our ability to scale horizontally," said Thod Nguyen, CTO at eHarmony. "MongoDB supports the scale that our business demands and allows us to generate matches in real-time that appeal to new users when they first log in. Fast, accurate matching is at the heart of our business, and MongoDB is vital to that success."

eHarmony evaluated a number of data management technologies to power the potential match generator of their Compatibility Matching System®. In addition to its rich query capabilities and flexible data model, eHarmony selected MongoDB for its built-in sharding and replication, and the ability to deploy new replica sets on demand. 

"MongoDB is the clear choice for companies like eHarmony that require a combination of flexibility, high-performance, scale and rich querying to handle the demands of large-scale systems," said Max Schireson, CEO at 10gen. "We're seeing an increasing trend across verticals for organizations running real-time applications like the Compatibility Matching System® that are benefiting from NoSQL technologies like MongoDB."

As one of the most popular new technologies, MongoDB has more than 4 million downloads, 95,000 Online Education registrations, 15,000 MongoDB User Group (MUG) members, 14,000 MongoDB Monitoring Service users and 10,000 attendees at MongoDB global events in 2012.

MongoDB is the open-source, document database popular among developers and IT professionals due to its agile and scalable approach. MongoDB provides a JSON data model with dynamic schemas, extensive driver support, auto-sharding, built-in replication and high availability, full and flexible index support, rich queries, aggregation, in-place updates and GridFS for large file storage.

About 10gen
10gen is the company behind MongoDB, the leading NoSQL database. MongoDB (named from "huMONGOus," meaning "extremely large") is reinventing data management and powering big data. Designed for how we build and run applications today, MongoDB empowers organizations to be more agile and scalable. It enables new types of applications, better customer experience, faster time to market and lower costs. The company has more than 600 customers, including many of the world's largest organizations. For more information, visit www.10gen.com.

About eHarmony, Inc.
Santa Monica, Calif.-based eHarmony, Inc. (www.eharmony.com) was founded in 2000 and is a pioneer in using relationship science to match singles seeking long-term relationships. Its service presents users with compatible matches based on key dimensions of personality that are scientifically proven to predict highly successful long-term relationships. New peer-reviewed research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) ranks eHarmony as number one for producing the most marriages and the most satisfied marriages. Of all meeting places measured, eHarmony also had the lowest divorce rate.b On average, 438 people marry every day in the U.S. as a result of being matched on eHarmony, nearly 4% of new marriages.b Currently, eHarmony operates online matchmaking services in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Brazil.

bBased on data on 19,131 marriages from 2005 to 2012 by Harris Interactive, couples that met on eHarmony had significantly fewer breakups than couples who met via all other methods combined. Combining methods that account for less than 1% of marriages sampled.