How does MongoDB work?

What is MongoDB?

Data is essential for gaining a competitive advantage in business. It has the power to reveal new insights that offer opportunities for profit, efficiency, and operational scaling. This is why organizations of all sizes and industries are eager to leverage data for an edge in the marketplace.

However, working with data can be challenging for many businesses due to various obstacles like database storage scalability, security, and compliance. Fortunately, MongoDB is a tool designed to help overcome these challenges and unlock the full potential of data for organizations. In this article, we will explore what MongoDB is, how it functions, and how organizations utilize it for specific applications to achieve significant business benefits.

The challenges of using data in organizations

Organizations require data for various use cases, and one of the most common is developing modern web-based applications. These web applications must adhere to high standards of quality; they need to perform exceptionally well, scale efficiently with user growth, and be easy and quick to develop and deploy. Consequently, designing and building these applications necessitates the use of an appropriate database.

Traditionally, web applications relied on relational databases as their primary data store, valuing well-normalized data models. However, as applications have evolved, many developers have shifted toward alternative data stores, such as NoSQL (Not Only Structured Query Language), which offer additional advantages.

MongoDB is an effective solution for organizations looking to develop modern web-based applications. MongoDB is an open-source NoSQL database management system: unlike traditional relational databases that store data in tables, rows, and columns with defined relationships between entities, it has a document-oriented approach. A document-oriented approach means it stores data in a JSON-like format, making it easier to represent and interact with complex data structures.

MongoDB’s data model and persistence strategies are designed for high read and write throughput, and it includes automatic failover capabilities. These features help organizations build scalable, data-driven applications effectively.

How does MongoDB works

Database structure that offers transactionality and speed

The most famous feature of MongoDB is its flexible data store because of its JSON-like document format. MongoDB stores records as documents (specifically BSON documents) gathered together in collections. A database holds one or more collections of documents. As an example, see the representation of the database, collection, and document below:

Given that a document-based data model can represent rich, hierarchical data structures, it’s often possible to model data without the complicated multi-table joins imposed by relational databases. For example, suppose you’re modelling products for an e-commerce web application. With a fully normalized relational data model, products’ information might consist of multiple tables. If you want to get a product representation from the database shell, you will need to write a complicated SQL query full of joins. Consequently, the database setup can be very complex, can slow down development time, and reduce the speed or performance of end application.

By contrast, with a document database, the product’s information can be modelled within a single document. Furthermore, the JSON-like structure describes an understandable representation of the products with a hierarchy. MongoDB’s query capabilities are designed specifically for manipulating both structured documents and unstructured data, which makes it easy to use for any database setup.

Another feature of MongoDB is that it offers an efficient way to search data with text, geospatial, or time-series dimensions. In addition, MongoDB includes features to analyze data, including support for multiple concurrent queries, indexing, and aggregation. Recent versions of MongoDB also include support for distributed, multi-document, multi-collection, multi-database, and multi-shard transactions with a high guarantee of data integrity.

Database scalability and high availability

As web applications, sites, and services become popular and gain more traffic, it is essential to ensure that the databases backing them are scalable and can adjust to user demands. Therefore, MongoDB is built on a horizontal scale-out architecture as shown in the figure below. Scaling horizontally means adding more servers to distribute the load across multiple nodes.

Scaling the database horizontally can be achieved in MongoDB through the sharding and replica set features. These scalability features also benefit fault tolerance in a MongoDB database deployment. The figure below shows the sharding model.

Sharding is a method for distributing data across multiple machines. There are various components in a sharded cluster:

• client:  an application server that uses the drivers such as python, javascript, C#, C++ and more  to integrate with the MongoDB router
• router (mongos) – a mongos operator that acts as an interface between client applications and the sharded cluster
• config-server (mongod) – store metadata and configuration settings for the cluster

multiple shards (mongod) – contain a subset of the sharded data, wherein each shard can be deployed as a replica set. The multiple shards represent a horizontal scale-out architecture since shards are deployed in multiple servers. Each shard can be deployed as a replica set.

A replica set is a group of mongod processes that maintain the same data set in a shard or config-server. Replica sets provide redundancy and high availability, and are the basis for all production deployments.  

The scalability and high availability of modern web applications are essential for it to handle a heavy workload, ensure consistent response times, simplify system maintenance, and decrease operational costs. In addition, applications should handle increasing numbers of users that use the applications concurrently. MongoDB can support these requirements with its horizontal scale-out architecture. Implementing them in web applications can bring numerous advantages for business.

Relational databases, on the other hand, can be challenging to set up in a way that distributes data across multiple systems and scales horizontally, in part because of the relational data model. Thus, most SQL database management systems use a scale-up architecture that relies on buying faster, higher-capacity hardware to fulfil usage demands.

Canonical for your MongoDB journey

Charmed MongoDB is an enhanced, open source and fully-compatible, drop-in replacement for the MongoDB Community Edition with advanced enterprise features – Canonical can support you at every stage of your MongoDB journey (from Day 0 to Day 2). 

If you’d like to learn more about Charmed MongoDB and how it can scale your web apps and optimize your business operations and costs, please contact our team.

Further reading

• MongoDB® for enterprise data management
• MongoDB® Toolkit: database security and support
• Charmed MongoDB 
• Learn more about Canonical’s Data Solutions

Trademark Notice

“MongoDB” is a trademark or registered trademark of MongoDB Inc. Other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Charmed MongoDB is not sponsored, endorsed, or affiliated with MongoDB, Inc.