Introduction to MongoDB¶

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What is MongoDB

Welcome to MongoDB. This document provides a brief introduction to MongoDB and some key concepts. See the installation guides for information on downloading and installing MongoDB.

What is MongoDB¶

MongoDB is an open-source document database that provides high performance, high availability, and automatic scaling.

Document Database¶

A record in MongoDB is a document, which is a data structure composed of field and value pairs. MongoDB documents are similar to JSON objects. The values of fields may include other documents, arrays, and arrays of documents.

The advantages of using documents are:

Documents (i.e. objects) correspond to native data types in many programming languages.
Embedded documents and arrays reduce need for expensive joins.
Dynamic schema supports fluent polymorphism.

Key Features¶

High Performance¶

MongoDB provides high performance data persistence. In particular,

Support for embedded data models reduces I/O activity on database system.
Indexes support faster queries and can include keys from embedded documents and arrays.

High Availability¶

To provide high availability, MongoDB’s replication facility, called replica sets, provide:

automatic failover.
data redundancy.

A replica set is a group of MongoDB servers that maintain the same data set, providing redundancy and increasing data availability.

Automatic Scaling¶

MongoDB provides horizontal scalability as part of its core functionality.

Automatic sharding distributes data across a cluster of machines.
Replica sets can provide eventually-consistent reads for low-latency high throughput deployments.

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