How to work around the lack of transactions in MongoDB?

Check this out, by Tokutek. They develop a plugin for Mongo that promises not only transactions but also a boosting in performance.

Now what's the problem with that? MongoDB can do atomic updates only on one document. In the previous flow it could happen that some kind of error creeps in and the message gets stored in the database but the user's balance is not gets reduced and/or the transaction is not gets logged.

This is not really a problem. The error you mentioned is either a logical (bug) or IO error (network, disk failure). Such kind of error can leave both transactionless and transactional stores in non-consistent state. For example, if it has already sent SMS but while storing message error occurred - it can't rollback SMS sending, which means it won't be logged, user balance won't be reduced etc.

The real problem here is the user can take advantage of race condition and send more messages than his balance allows. This also applies to RDBMS, unless you do SMS sending inside transaction with balance field locking (which would be a great bottleneck). As a possible solution for MongoDB would be using findAndModify first to reduce the balance and check it, if it's negative disallow sending and refund the amount (atomic increment). If positive, continue sending and in case it fails refund the amount. The balance history collection can be also maintained to help fix/verify balance field.

As of 4.0, MongoDB will have multi-document ACID transactions. The plan is to enable those in replica set deployments first, followed by the sharded clusters. Transactions in MongoDB will feel just like transactions developers are familiar with from relational databases - they'll be multi-statement, with similar semantics and syntax (like start_transaction and commit_transaction). Importantly, the changes to MongoDB that enable transactions do not impact performance for workloads that do not require them.

For more details see here.

Having distributed transactions, doesn't mean that you should model your data like in tabular relational databases. Embrace the power of the document model and follow the good and recommended practices of data modeling.

Bring it to the point: if transactional integrity is a must then don't use MongoDB but use only components in the system supporting transactions. It is extremely hard to build something on top of component in order to provide ACID-similar functionality for non-ACID compliant components. Depending on the individual usecases it may make sense to separate actions into transactional and non-transactional actions in some way...