What did MongoDB not being ACID compliant before v4 really mean?

One thing you lose with MongoDB is multi-collection (table) transactions. Atomic modifiers in MongoDB can only work against a single document.

If you need to remove an item from inventory and add it to someone's order at the same time - you can't. Unless those two things - inventory and orders - exist in the same document (which they probably do not).

I encountered this very same issue in an application I am working on and had two possible solutions to choose from:

1) Structure your documents as best you can and use atomic modifiers as best you can and for the remaining bit, use a background process to cleanup records that may be out of sync. For example, I remove items from inventory and add them to a reservedInventory array of the same document using atomic modifiers.

This lets me always know that items are NOT available in the inventory (because they are reserved by a customer). When the customer check's out, I then remove the items from the reservedInventory. Its not a standard transaction and since the customer could abandon the cart, I need some background process to go through and find abandoned carts and move the reserved inventory back into the available inventory pool.

This is obviously less than ideal, but its the only part of a large application where mongodb does not fit the need perfectly. Plus, it works flawlessly thus far. This may not be possible for many scenarios, but because of the document structure I am using, it fits well.

2) Use a transactional database in conjunction with MongoDB. It is common to use MySQL to provide transactions for the things that absolutely need them while letting MongoDB (or any other NoSQL) do what it does best.

If my solution from #1 does not work in the long run, I will investigate further into combining MongoDB with MySQL but for now #1 suits my needs well.

It's actually not correct that MongoDB is not ACID-compliant. On the contrary, MongoDB is ACID-compilant at the document level.

Any update to a single document is

• Atomic: it either fully completes or it does not
• Consistent: no reader will see a "partially applied" update
• Isolated: again, no reader will see a "dirty" read
• Durable: (with the appropriate write concern)

What MongoDB doesn't have is transactions -- that is, multiple-document updates that can be rolled back and are ACID-compliant.

Note that you can build transactions on top of the ACID-compliant updates to a single document, by using two-phase commit.