[keycloak-user] Keycloak in production. Use MongoDB or an RDBMS flavour?

[Ton Swieb]

Hi Marek,

Thank you for your answer. So if I understand you correctly there are
no plans to drop Mongo support in the near feature. Good to know.

How many (concurrent) users did you need to use to see a performance
difference between Mongo and MySQL?

I assume the lack of transaction support in Mongo only becomes an
issue with multi row/document transactions. Are multi row/document
transactions used commonly in the Keycloak application or are most
transactions limited to a single row/document?

Regards, Ton

2016-05-11 9:45 GMT+02:00 Marek Posolda <mposolda at redhat.com>:
> On 10/05/16 14:18, Ton Swieb wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I understand from the Keycloak documentation that both MongoDB and
>> multiple flavours of RDBMS are supported, but I cannot find any
>> recommendation whether to use MongoDB or an RDBMS by default.
>>
>> Which one is best suited for the Keycloak product?
>> I am anticipating a user base of around 10000 users (mainly via
>> Identity Brokering), will use offline tokens and use Keycloak as an
>> Identity Broker for a SAML IdP. I am starting from a green field
>> situation and do not have any restrictions on using a specific DB.
>>
>> I found a comment of Bill Birke on the Keycloak developer
>> mailing-list,
>> http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/keycloak-dev/2015-July/004924.html,
>> wishing he could drop Mongo and not seeing any advantages of using
>> Mongo, but unfortunately the thread does not end with a
>> conclusion/decision :-)
>>
>> What is the current position of the Keycloak team about using Mongo?
>
> We added Mongo support very early (somewhen around 2013) as an alternative
> storage, which was at that time required by other project, which consumed
> keycloak. The second project (Liveoak) is not under active development
> anymore, but in the meantime, a lot of people started to use Keycloak with
> Mongo and it seems that some of them already in production.
>
> The advantage of Mongo is good performance and scalability. At some point,
> when I tested performance with bigger number of users, I saw much better
> performance for Mongo then for MySQL. Also Mongo has support for DB
> clustering and sharding (some RDBMS has it too AFAIK, but usually you need
> to pay for them, which is not the case with Mongo ;)) . On the other hand,
> biggest disadvantage of Mongo is missing support for transactions. So in
> theory, if some error/bad situation happens, you can theoretically end with
> partially inconsistent data in DB.
>
> Marek
>>
>>
>> In which scenario should I consider using MongoDB over an RDBMS or
>> vice versa? There are off course the usual pro/con's between NoSQL and
>> RDBMS, but I would like to know to what extend they hold true when it
>> comes to using Keycloak in production or whether Keycloak is optimized
>> specifically for NoSQL or RDBMS.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Ton
>>
>

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