Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Part 3
MongoDB mastery
Having read the first two parts of the topic, you should understand
MongoDB quite well from a developer's perspective. Now it's time to switch
roles. In this final part of the topic, we'll look at MongoDB from the database
administrator's perspective. This means we'll cover all the things you need to
know about performance, deployments, fault tolerance, and scalability.
To get the best performance from MongoDB, you have to design efficient
queries and then ensure that they're properly indexed. This is what you'll learn
in chapter 7. You'll see why indexes are important, and you'll learn how they're
chosen and then traversed by the query optimizer. You'll also learn how to use
helpful tools like the query explainer and the profiler.
Chapter 8 is devoted to replication. You'll spend most of this chapter learn-
ing how replica sets work and how to deploy them intelligently for high availabil-
ity and automatic failover. In addition, you'll learn how to use replication to
scale application reads and to customize the durability of writes.
Horizontal scalability is the holy grail for modern database systems;
MongoDB scales horizontally by partitioning data in a processes known as
shard-
ing
. Chapter 9 presents sharding theory and practice, showing when to use it,
how to design schemas around it, and how to deploy it.
The last chapter describes the niceties of deployment and administration. In
chapter 10 we'll look at specific hardware and operating system recommenda-
tions. You'll then learn how to back up, monitor, and troubleshoot live
MongoDB clusters.
