Mongoose is a popular Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for Node.js for interacting with MongoDB, facilitating data relationships and schema validation. It acts as a translator between code objects and MongoDB objects. Despite being an unofficial community driver, it is highly recommended for ORM usage.

It is akin to an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) such as SQLAlchemy for traditional SQL databases.

Some terminologies that should give more context are explained as well:

• Driver:

  The word that we use to describe the library that's made to interact with the database.

• ORM:

  It stands for Object-relational mapping, it's a way to align programming code with database structures. ORM allows us to use the library and the library constructs the queries for us.

  So, it's a layer of interaction between the programming language and the database.

  ORMs are commonly used to streamline the migration of data between databases.

• MongoDB:

  It is one of the most popular open-source document-based NoSQL databases in the world today, if not the most popular one. It stores data in a type of JSON format called BSON.