MongoDB: Flexible, scalable NoSQL In recent years, a number of document stores have come out and garnered a high degree of developer mind share. One of the most popular of these is MongoDB, an open source, schema-free document store written in C++ that boasts support for a wide array of programming languages, a SQL-like query language, and a number of intriguing features related to performance and scalability.
Out of the box, Mongo supports sharding, which permits horizontal scaling by divvying up a collection of documents across a cluster of nodes, thus making reads faster. What's more, Mongo offers replication in two modes: master-slave and replica sets. In a replica set, there is no master node; instead, all nodes are copies of one another and there is no single point of failure. Replica sets therefore bring more fault tolerance to larger environments supporting massive amounts of data. These features and more don't require an army of DBAs to implement, nor do they need massive hardware expenditures. Mongo can run on commodity hardware platforms, provided there is a healthy amount of memory.
Mongo is schema-less -- it'll store any document you decide to put into it. There is no upfront document definition requirement. Ultimately, documents are grouped into collections, which are akin to tables in a relational database. Collections can be defined on the fly as well. Documents are stored in a binary JSON format, dubbed BSON, and encapsulate data represented as name-value pairs (which are somewhat like columns and rows).
MongoDB: JSON document storeJSON is an extremely understandable format. Humans can easily read it (as opposed to XML, for example) and machines can efficiently parse it. A document in Mongo representing a business card, for example, would look something like this:
In this case, the _id attribute in the document above represents a primary key in Mongo. Like a relational database, Mongo can index data and force uniqueness on data attributes. By default, the _id attribute is indexed; moreover, this document can further index individual fields or even a combination of them (for example, the name and address). Additionally, when defining an index, you can specify that its value be unique.
