Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Simply stated, MongoDB is an extraordinarily dynamic database; the preceding
example would never work in a relational database, unless you also added each possible
field to your table. Doing so would be a waste of both space and performance, not to
mention highly disorganized.
Drilling Down on Collections
As mentioned previously,
collection
is a commonly used term in MongoDB. You can think
of a collection as a container that stores your documents (that is, your data), as shown in
Figure
3-1
.
Database
Collections
Documents
Figure 3-1.
The MongoDB database model
Now compare the MongoDB database model to a typical model for a relational
database (see Figure
3-2
).
