openvidu/openvidu-dashboard/openspec/changes/analytics-requires-mongodb/proposal.md

Proposal

Why

The writer updates every entity with an aggregation pipeline, creates track_stats as a time-series collection when it can, uses partial indexes with $in and validators with validationAction: warn. Amazon DocumentDB (5.0 and 8.0) supports none of the first, third and fourth, so database initialization fails and the server refuses to start: failed to start analytics: ... Feature not supported: validationAction:warn. Deployments that use DocumentDB as their external database would lose the whole OpenVidu server on upgrade, not only analytics.

What Changes

• Before initializing the database, the writer checks that it runs updates with an aggregation pipeline, without writing. A database that does not (Amazon DocumentDB) disables analytics: the server logs an error that names the reason and that analytics and the dashboard need MongoDB, then starts and runs without analytics. It writes nothing to that database.
• Every other analytics startup failure still stops the server.
• The dashboard's private CA variable is no longer described as a way to use Amazon DocumentDB.

Scope excludes the following:

• A write path for databases without pipeline updates.
• The dashboard against such a database, which reports an uninitialized writer schema as it already does.
• The public documentation of external databases, updated with the release documentation.

Edition: CE and PRO (writer). Repositories: openvidu-livekit (openvidu/analytics, openvidu/openvidu.go) and the dashboard (specs, CHANGELOG).

CHANGELOG lines:

• openvidu-dashboard/CHANGELOG.md, Upgrade notes: analytics and the dashboard require MongoDB; on Amazon DocumentDB the server starts with analytics disabled. The DATABASE_TLS_CA_FILE line no longer names DocumentDB.
• openvidu-livekit CHANGELOG-openvidu.md, Changed: the same behaviour of the server.

Capabilities

New Capabilities

None.

Modified Capabilities

• server-analytics-writer: a database without pipeline updates disables analytics instead of stopping the server.
• deployment-compatibility: the private CA requirement names no DocumentDB.

Impact

• Writer: InitializeAnalytics probes the database after the connection check; openvidu.Start treats the unsupported database as analytics disabled. Unit tests of the probe classification and an integration test against MongoDB.
• Dashboard: specs and CHANGELOG only.