Do compound shard keys in MongoDB work similar to compound indexes? - mongodb

Suppose my collection uses a compound shard key consisting of BlockHash and BlockHeight fields.
If I ran a query to look up documents for a given BLockHeight, will Mongo have to hit every shard since we did not filter by BlockHash? Does having BlockHeight in the shard key help the query at all?

Ideally every query should have the shard key. Choose based on cardinality and logical categorisation of your data.
If you are sharding on BlockHash and BlockHeight (in that order), and you just run a query on BlockHeight. You will end up with hitting all the shards.
As a best practice, make it a habit of running .explain("executionStats") with your queries. This will tell you how your query is parsed. And which Shards did it touch.

Related

Need help to select sharding key in MongoDB

For my application I need to shard a fairly big collection, the entire collection will contain app. 500 billion documents.
I have two potential fields which can be used as Sharding Key:
For inserting either Sharding Key will distribute documents evenly throughout the cluster, there is does not matter which field I use as Sharding Key.
For query it is different.
Field(1) is usually part of the query filter condition, thus query would be processed usually on a single shard only.
Field(2) is typically not part of the query filter condition, thus query would be processed over all shards and typically several shards will contribute to final query result.
Which one is the better field to be used as Sharding Key? I did not find anything in MongoDB documentation about that topic.
Either fields have the same range and very similar cardinality figures, there won't be any difference. Usually the number of documents returned by a query is very low (typically less than 20-30 documents).
In a sharded cluster the mongos router determines which shard is to be targeted for a read or write operation - based on the available shard key meta-data stored on the config servers.
For inserting either Sharding Key will distribute documents evenly
throughout the cluster, there is does not matter which field I use as
Sharding Key.
When you insert a document it will have a shard key and the document will be stored on a designated shard.
Field(1) is usually part of the query filter condition, thus query
would be processed usually on a single shard only.
The shard key's main purposes are (a) to distribute data evenly across shards in a cluster, and (b) to be able to query the data in such a way that the query targets a single shard.
For a query to target a single shard, the shard key must be part of the query's filter criteria. The mongos router will target the single shard using the shard key.
If the shard key is not part of the filter criteria it will be a scatter-gather operation (a long running query). It is important that the most important query operations of the application using the sharded collection must be able use the shard key.
Field(2) is typically not part of the query filter condition, thus
query would be processed over all shards and typically several shards
will contribute to final query result.
When the shard key is not part of the query filter, the operation will span across multiple shards (a scatter-gather operation) and it will be a slow running operation. The mongos router will not be able to determine which shards have the target data, and all the shards in the cluster will be queried to return the final result.
Which one is the better field to be used as Sharding Key?
It can be concluded that the Field(1) must be used as a shard key.
See documentation on shard keys and choosing a shard key # MongoDB docs on Shard Keys.

Mongodb: Determining shard key strategy on compound index

I have a collection with 170 millions+ documents and it is only going
to increase. The size of the collection is not that huge, currently
around 70 GB.
The collection has two fields indexed on: {AgentId:1, PropertyId:1}.
Generally one imports a huge file(millions of documents) belonging to
a particular AgentId but the PropertyId(non numeric nullable) is
mostly random unique value.
Currently I have two shards with shard key based on {_id: hashed}. But
I am planning to change the shard key to compound Index {AgentId:1,
PropertyId:1} because I think it will improve query performance( most
of the queries are based on AgentId filter). Not sure whether one can
have a nullable field in the shard key. If this is the case then app
will make sure that the PropertyId is random no.
So looking to get a picture as to
How the data will be distributed to shards during insertion
and how the range of a chunks are calculated during insertion?
Since the PropertyId is random value. Does the compound key fits the
definition of monotonically increasing value?
I am a newbie to mongodb. And wanted to know if I am on the right path?
Thanks
There is no automatic support in MongoDB for changing a shard key after sharding a collection.
This reality underscores the importance of choosing a good shard key. If you must change a shard key after sharding a collection, the best option is to:
dump all data from MongoDB into an external format.
drop the original sharded collection.
configure sharding using a more ideal shard key.
pre-split the shard key range to ensure initial even distribution.
restore the dumped data into MongoDB.

MongoDB Shard key Selection

I've a scenario in which I don't know what would be the structure & fields of collections in MongoDb. Also there will be like multiple single DB per user(Like Multi-tenant DB).
I'll be deploying Replicated sharded cluster in production.For scaling & better machine optimization, I'm applying sharding on per DB basis during the creation of each DB, and each collection under the same DB will be sharded to different shards. Now in this scenario I'm not sure which key would be the best choice since the structure & field(s) of collection(s) which would be created under each DB will be unknown. Since the structure of DB, Collection is unknown I can't forecast which type of query will be used most of the time. So I want to select a shard key which would fulfill all the criteria for shard key selection like: Cardinality, Query Isolation, Monotonically increasing, Write scaling, Easily divisible.
What would be the solution in this scenario?
Also What if I select all the fields under that collection for shard key along with hashed _id field as compound key?
Once you create a shard key you can not edit it.
So keep pumping the data into the collection, once you get clarity on the fields you can shard the collections any time.
Rebalancing happens automatically after sharding.

What is the performance of a query that doesn't contains the shard key in a sharded MongoDB environment?

The title is saying everything. Assume that you have a sharded MongoDB environment and the user provide a query, which doesn't contain the shard key. What is the actual performance of the query? What happens in the background?
The performance depends on any number of factors however, the default action of MongoDB in this case is to do a global scatter and gather operation whereby it will send the query to all shards and then merge duplicates to give you an end result.
Returning to the performance, it normally depends upon the indexes on each shard and the isolated optimisation of their data sets and how much range of a dataset they hold.
However processing is parallel in sharding which means they all get the query and the "master" mongod will just merge as they come in, so the performance shouldn't be: go to shard 1, get it, then shard 2; instead it should be: go to all shards, each shard return its results and the master merges and returns.
Here is a good presentation (with nice pictures) on exactly how queries with sharding work in certain situations: http://www.slideshare.net/mongodb/how-queries-work-with-sharding
If the query is maked on the sharded collections the query is maked on all shard, if the query is maked on non shared collections, mongoDB take all data on the same shard.
I add the link for shard FAQ on MongoDB
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/sharding/

mongodb sparse indexes and shard key

I looked through the docs, and couldn't find a clear answer
Say I have a sparse index on [a,b,c]
Will documents with "a" "b" fields but not "c" be inserted to the index?
Is having the shard key indexed obligatory in the latest mongodb version ?
If so, is it possible to shard on [a] using the above compound sparse index?
(say a,b will always exist)
If c is not present, and query uses c index in the query plan, then document will not be found because it is not present in the index.
Shard key must be indexed and be unique. Also have a look at the notes on shard key on the sharding reference doc, it says
The ideal shard key:
is easily divisible which makes it easy for MongoDB to distribute
content among the shards. Shard keys that have a limited number of
possible values are not ideal as they can result in some chunks that
are “unsplitable.” See the Cardinality section for more information.
will distribute write operations among the cluster, to prevent any
single shard from becoming a bottleneck. Shard keys that have a high
correlation with insert time are poor choices for this reason;
however, shard keys that have higher “randomness” satisfy this
requirement better. See the Write Scaling section for additional
background. will make it possible for the mongos to return most query
operations directly from a single specific mongod instance. Your shard
key should be the primary field used by your queries, and fields with
a high degree of “randomness” are poor choices for this reason. See
the Query Isolation section for specific examples.
so if hypothetically, if mongo accepts a sparse index as shard key, mongo will not know where to place docs which don't fit in the index. One can argue, put them all in another shard for this purpose. Counter argument would be, what happens if it outgrows ... hence I don't think it would make sense to do it, even if it is allowed.
3- I doubt sparse index will work because shards require a unique index and a sparse index does not fulfill the criteria. The unique index requirement, I haven't found in docs, but if you use the mongo admin shell help, it tells you about it.