Book Image

Mastering MongoDB 3.x

By : Alex Giamas
Book Image

Mastering MongoDB 3.x

By: Alex Giamas

Overview of this book

MongoDB has grown to become the de facto NoSQL database with millions of users—from small startups to Fortune 500 companies. Addressing the limitations of SQL schema-based databases, MongoDB pioneered a shift of focus for DevOps and offered sharding and replication maintainable by DevOps teams. The book is based on MongoDB 3.x and covers topics ranging from database querying using the shell, built in drivers, and popular ODM mappers to more advanced topics such as sharding, high availability, and integration with big data sources. You will get an overview of MongoDB and how to play to its strengths, with relevant use cases. After that, you will learn how to query MongoDB effectively and make use of indexes as much as possible. The next part deals with the administration of MongoDB installations on-premise or in the cloud. We deal with database internals in the next section, explaining storage systems and how they can affect performance. The last section of this book deals with replication and MongoDB scaling, along with integration with heterogeneous data sources. By the end this book, you will be equipped with all the required industry skills and knowledge to become a certified MongoDB developer and administrator.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Advantages of sharding

In database systems and computing systems in general, we have two ways to improve performance. The first one is to simply replace our servers with more powerful ones, keeping the same network topology and systems architecture. This is called vertical scaling.

An advantage of vertical scaling is that it is simple from an operational standpoint, especially with cloud providers such as Amazon making it as easy as a few clicks to replace an m2.medium with an m2.extralarge server instance.

Another advantage is that we don't need to make any code changes and there is little to no risk of something going catastrophically wrong.

The main disadvantage of vertical scaling is that there is a limit to it; we can only get as powerful servers as our cloud provider can provide to us.

A related disadvantage is that getting more powerful servers is generally not a linear...