What is MongoDB?

What is MongoDB?

It’s an open-source NoSQL database developed for high performance, high availability, and easy scalability. Collection and document are the two primarily used terms/concepts in MongoDB. Here, Collection is referred to a group of these documents, which is like an RDBMS table.

Mapping RDBMS to MongoDB

Definition

These are a NoSQL database, which is cross-platform document-oriented. It uses the BSON format for document storage and communication with its client. BSON is a binary form of JSON.

Let’s see some basic differences between MongoDB and RDBMS:

Difference Between MongoDB and RDBMS	RDBMS	MongoDB
Schema	Fixed schema	Schema-less
Transactions	Supports transactions	Compromises on transactions by giving high availability and partitioning.
Sharding	No	Yes
Query Caching	No query caching here	Query caching happens here, which leads to a faster access to data.

Understanding

Let’s understand the core of MongoDB. It works on an extended version of JSON kn0wn as BSON (Binary JSON), which is:

1. Lightweight
2. Traversable
3. Efficient

These drivers are responsible for sending and receiving data in BSON format. It stores the data as a BSON Object. Encoding to BSON and Decoding to BSON again happens very quickly, and so it’s so efficient. Here are a few terms related to MongoDB, which is used while using it. Let’s get familiar with that:

• Collection: Its group of MongoDB documents. This can be thought similar to a table in RDBMS like Oracle, MySQL. This collection doesn’t enforce any structure. Hence schema-less MongoDB is so popular.
• Document: Document is referred to as a record in MongoDB collection.

Collection hierarchy

The picture shown above makes the concepts clear about collections and documents in MongoDB.

• Field– It is a name-value pair in a document. A document has zero or more fields. Fields are like columns in relational databases.

How does MongoDB make working so easy?

• It is based on the schema-less format for data storage and BSON format for communicating with its client; it manages and innovatively stores the data. With increased internet access, the world has drifted towards more heavy traffic flow, which can be unmanageable. It is very much capable of handling heavy traffic flow for all websites and applications with ease.
• It is based on the sharding concept. It relies on vertical scaling, where you need to add more CPU and memory with the increasing demand for processing power. Here one can use more than one server to fulfill the requirement of processing power. It follows the principle of the distributed system.
• It uses internal memory for storing the working data sets, enabling faster access to the data. It also Optimizes your schema for the most frequent use cases.
• It has a rich set of queries for performing fast and easy operations.

Top Companies

All big giants ruling the IT market nowadays relying on MongoDB. These include Adobe, Nokia, eBay, SAP, Cisco, Verizon, etc.

Here are some comments from them:

• SAP: It is a core database pinning SAP’s platform as a service content management system.
• Cisco: Through MongoDB, managing our collaborative space.
• Adobe: Content management system relies on MongoDB.

The various subsets

There are various subsets of MongoDB, which make it so are:

1. mongod, the core database process;
2. mongos the controller and query router for sharded clusters;
3. mongo the interactive MongoDB Shell.

It handles all the data requests, manages data access, and performs various background management operations. So, backend all tedious tasks are handled by MongoDB.

Mongos is responsible for processing queries from the application layer. It also determines the location of this data in the sharded cluster to complete the task.

Mongo is an interactive JavaScript shell interface to MongoDB, through which administrators and developers interact with MongoDB to test queries and run the operations.

What can you do with MongoDB?

It can be used to address ample of business problems, as it advanced technology. Here are some use cases that can bring out more ideas and thoughts for you, which you will find relevant to many scenarios and implement.

1. Real-Time Analytics: Gone is the era of batch analytics, which used to be complex and time-consuming as well. With the help of MongoDB, that has brought a revolution in bringing down the latency (fraction of seconds) and making the availability high (99%). Example: Apps and browser.
2. Product Catalogue: As we know, It is based on the dynamic schema. So, it can keep relevant values per attribute rather than keeping all records in all attributes. This leads to a speedy and good user experience in updating any record.
3. Scalability and dynamicity: As more development and research are happening, companies need to store various data and its various sources. Their environment demand to be so flexible and progressive that growth should not see any obstacle. It provides a great solution there.

Working with MongoDB

Once you start the mongo shell, here, we will discuss a few important MongoDB commands that will help you working with MongoDB.

1. To insert documents.

• db.collection.insertOne()

• db.collection.insert many()

2. To retrieve a document from the collection.

• db.collection.find()

3. To update the existing document in the collection.

• db.collection.updateOne()

• db.collection.updateMany()

• db.collection.replaceOne()

4. Removal of document from collection

• db.collection.deleteOne()

• db.collection.deleteMany()

5. To authenticate a connection

6. Find Distinct value in the collection

This returns a document that contains an array of distinct values.

7. Text Search

These indexes the text when stored in a collection. $text query operator is used to perform text searches on a collection. To find all documents containing “Politics issue.”

Advantages

Different advantages are mentioned below:

• Easy on Use: This easy to install and setup makes it outstanding from its other document-based NoSQL database. Plus, no more good coding background is required. You should know JSON to understand the tree structure of the collection here.
• No Complex Joins: It is based on BSON format – key-value pair, hence no complex joins here.
• Many Supported Platforms: It supports wide varieties of platforms: Windows, Ubuntu, Debian, Solaris, macOS. This makes it very popular among developers.
• Agility: With quickly evolving needs of requirements, the flexible data model is needed to address all those. A fixed schema-based data model can’t address that all, schema-less data model MongoDB makes itself popular because of its ability to scale and its highly dynamic nature. It’s exceptionally easy to add or change fields in MongoDB.
• Faster Access to Data: Due to its nature of using the storage’s internal memory, it provides fast access to the data.
• Horizontal Scaling: It relies on horizontal and not on vertical scaling like RDBMS. The expense gets reduced, as no CPU and memory needs to be added on the same server. One can utilize more servers with more processing requirements. This not only reduces cost expenses of CPU, memory addition but also reduces the maintenance cost.

Required Skills

Here are certainly important skills that are required from a person specialized in MongoDB:

• Implementation of appropriate indexes (B-Tree, Geospatial, Text) for performance improvement
• One should be aware of ways to optimally implementing the backup and recovery.
• One should be able to develop the Proof of concept around MongoDB and its API’s
• One should also be able to detect performance problems using Mongo Profiler.
• It also required that MongoDB person should be aware of methodologies and potential limitations of MongoDB.

Why should we use MongoDB?

NoSQL is the need of the era. With rapid changes and huge scalability demand, NoSQL is the ultimate solution any organization can think of. Here we are listing some benefits of using MongoDB, which help you think of relevant cases:

1. Supports Heterogeneous data
2. No joins
3. Distributed in nature
4. High performance, scalability, and availability
5. Supports multiple platforms
6. Document-based query language
7. Very Flexible in field addition/deletion as it is schemaless

Scope

It fulfils today’s era requirement, with a quick, easy learning curve. Due to open source, high performance, scalability, and availability, many companies are using it in the production phase. From a learning perspective, you only need to know JSON, a simple programming language.

Going down the line for more years, more companies will be moving to MongoDB, making it even more popular, and hence market demand for MongoDB skills will go higher.

Why do we need it?

When there comes, the scenario of storing data, storing it in columns and rows form is a traditional way as it led to ample of space wastage.

Today’s enterprise is far more flexible and beyond expectations. For better customer service and modern application development, an enterprise should be ready to adopt any changes and fulfil the expectations.

Henceforth, the need of the hour is to use a NoSQL database. It is the go-to choice because it is based on NoSQL, plus it offers high performance, availability, and scalability. It helps an organization manage data hassle-free. Along with this, schema validation can be used to enforce data governance controls over each collection.

Who is the right audience for learning MongoDB technologies?

Here we are listing some IT roles, which are considered the right audience for MongoDB technologies. However, it’s not restricted to these roles.

Roles:

1. Database administrators, Analytics professionals, like data analysts, Data scientists.
2. Software developers, Infrastructure leads, architects, Big Data consultants, etc.
3. Research Fellows.

Knowing MongoDB will help these all roles to make better choices and business decisions.

How will this technology help you in career growth?

The rising popularity of MongoDB is because of its flexible, quick nature and powerful query language. With a huge amount and types of data, MongoDB is becoming but the obvious choice to be used by any organization.

Here are some of the top companies that are using MongoDB are:

• Cisco
• SAP
• Telefonica
• EA
• eBay
• Ericsson
• Forbes
• Intuit
• LexisNexis

Adopting NoSQL over SQL database is driving the trend of the market today, and hence prediction is of increasing demand for MongoDB skills. Hence, learning this is going to give a huge boost in career growth.

Conclusion

After going through all the above content, it’s pretty clear that MongoDB has already been absorbed by the top many companies and will keep on getting absorbed in the IT market for other companies as well. This is a powerful and prominent technology. More implementation and practical skills will be required going further, and hence more people will be seen drifting towards this technology. It has the power of extracting each bit out of big data. Learning MongoDB is a lucrative step and will open far more lucrative jobs in the near future.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to What is MongoDB. Here we discussed the basic concepts of MongoDB and how and where it can help career growth. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

1. What is a Data Warehouse?
2. Guide to MongoDB creates Index.
3. MongoDB find
4. Guide to MongoDB Delete