How MCP could add value to MongoDB databases

MongoDB has added Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) to all its databases, including Atlas, to help developers accelerate software development and manage database administrative tasks.

MCP, which has seen a rise in popularity since its release in November last year, is an open protocol that allows AI agents inside applications to access external tools and data to complete a user request using a client-server mechanism, where the client is the AI agent or agentic interface and the server provides tools and data.

The rise in MCP’s popularity can be attributed, in turn, to the proliferation of agentic applications that can perform tasks without manual intervention, allowing enterprises and their teams to do more with limited resources.

However, in order to make any application agentic, developers need to make use of a protocol, such as MCP, to connect it to a large language models (LLMs) for reasoning as well as provide necessary data for context, and tools to complete a user request without manual intervention.

Managing database administrative tasks via MCP clients

In MongoDB’s case, developers can make use of the MongoDB MCP Server, which is currently in public preview, to integrate MCP-supported clients, such as Windsurf, Cursor, GitHub Copilot in VS Code, and Anthropic Claude, to its databases — Atlas, MongoDB Community Edition, and MongoDB Enterprise Advanced.

Post integration, developers would be able to use these MCP-supported clients to explore data inside databases or query data for analytics in natural language, the company wrote.

Additionally, developers would also be able to use these clients to perform database administration tasks, such as creating a new database user with read-only access or listing the current network access rules, in natural language.

These capabilities, according to Benjamin Flast, director of Product Management at MongoDB, free developers from undifferentiated tasks like manual query optimization and database administration, thereby increasing productivity, which results in accelerated application development.

Moor Insights & Strategy Principal Analyst Jason Andersen said that most database vendors are likely to adopt MCP, just like they have retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for providing context to LLMs.

MongoDB isn’t the only database provider that has added support for MCP. Several databases, such as PostgreSQL and SQL, already support the protocol via Azure Database for PostgreSQL MCP Server, PG-MCP, and MySQL MCP Server, respectively.Google recently announced support for MCP integration for databases through its GenAI Toolbox for Databases. It also renamed its GenAI Toolbox for Databases to MCP Toolbox for Databases.

Data management and analytics platform providers, according to The Futurum Group’s lead for data and analytics practice, Bradley Shimmin, are in the process of developing their own MCP implementations and blending those into their individual user workflows

“Data integrator and API manager Boomi, for example, is setting up its own MCP gateway to marshal and manage MCP requests from across many disparate MCP servers,” Shimmin said.

Context-aware vibe coding via MCP clients

Another advantage of MongoDB integrating MCP with its databases is to help developers code faster, Flast said, adding that the integration will help in context-aware code generation via natural language in MCP supported coding assistants, such as Windsurf, Cursor, and Claude Desktop.

“Providing context, such as schemas and data structures, enables more accurate code generation, reducing hallucinations and enhancing agent capabilities,” MongoDB explained in the blog, adding that developers can describe the data they need and the coding assistant can generate the MongoDB query along with application code that is needed to interact with it.

MongoDB’s efforts to introduce context-aware vibe coding via MCP clients, according to Andersen, will help enterprises reduce costs, both financial and technical debt, and sustain integrations with AI infrastructure.

However, Shimmin pointed out that MCP integration with databases will usher in a trend where two modes of development practices — Direct API access via SDKs and MCP integration — will co-mingle.

“Direct API access will deliver the best performance and control for highly programmatic interactions. For more flexible interactions, where LLMs might stand in for software developers, writing their own, ‘soft’ APIs on the fly, enterprises will rely upon standard resource documentation like MCP to guide those models in accessing those resources,” Shimmin said.

Security issues around MCP

According to Matt Aslett, director at ISG Software Research, MCP has a host of security issues, especially around access control, although the analyst expects to see solutions to these challenges from the developer community due to the protocol’s proliferation.

Andersen pointed out that developers and enterprises, with support from vendors, in general, are deploying MCP within a cloud to bypass access control issues as cloud has a common authentication and authorization infrastructure.

“This helps ensure that the right resources are allowed to talk to each other. So, when deployed in a homogeneous environment, you are trusting what is already in place,” Andersen said, adding that some enterprises or developers might feel the cloud workaround as “not good enough”.

Similarly, Shimmin pointed out that securing MCP will be up to the database vendors themselves, as they have to ensure that they are not opening up access to data without some means of controlling that access.