I am new to mongodb and wish to create a distributed database environment using docker-compose with mongodb. I've created multiple docker with shards to simulate multiple sites. However, I have a problem to replicate the same set of documents into multiple shards.
For example I have a collection with a key that has value "A" and "B". I want to distribute this collection into 2 shards where
Shard 1 = A & B
Shard 2 = B only
However, when I run the balancer it distributes all A's into shard 1 and B's into shard 2. Is there any way I can do the sharding with repeated data or am I using the wrong approach for my problem?
You might be approaching sharding (horizontal scaling) incorrectly. What makes sharding in Mongo work is that the sharding key is chosen such that it results in (vertical) shards which have a roughly even distribution of data, or a similar number of Mongo documents. A requirement of sharding which makes it work well is that queries would typically be directed to only a single shard. If you have queries which need to return some field having the different values of A and B, then it implies that this field should not be the sharding key. Queries can go across shards, but certain cross-shard operations, such as joins, can be very costly. In your particular case, perhaps some other field could be used as sharding key.
Redundancy in MongoDB is provided by replica sets, not sharded clusters.
Each shard can be backed by a replica set with your desired number of nodes to provide the required redundancy level.
It is not possible to have the same document be (authoritatively) located in multiple shards.
Related
It has the following one-to-many relationship.
UserProfile - UserActivity,
UserProfile - UserItem,
UserProfile - ... ,
and so on.
Since there are many documents such as UserActivity and UserItem, collections are used instead of arrays.
As far as I know, even if the _id of the documents is the same, they are distributed and stored.
Same shards across different MongoDB collections
What I'm curious about is whether using a shard zone to store documents of a specific user in one shard and access them as transaction is faster than distributed transaction. Both read and write.
(Shards are physically close)
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/sharding-segmenting-shards/
Pay attention to Sharding Query Pattern:
The ideal shard key distributes data evenly across the sharded cluster while also facilitating common query patterns. When you choose a shard key, consider your most common query patterns and whether a given shard key covers them.
In a sharded cluster, the mongos routes queries to only the shards that contain the relevant data if the queries contain the shard key. When the queries do not contain the shard key, the queries are broadcast to all shards for evaluation. These types of queries are called scatter-gather queries. Queries that involve multiple shards for each request are less efficient and do not scale linearly when more shards are added to the cluster.
This does not apply for aggregation queries that operate on a large amount of data. In these cases, scatter-gather can be a useful approach that allows the query to run in parallel on all shards.
See also Zones:
Some common deployment patterns where zones can be applied are as follows:
Isolate a specific subset of data on a specific set of shards. (Maybe enforced by some data protection laws)
Ensure that the most relevant data reside on shards that are geographically closest to the application servers.
Route data to shards based on the hardware / performance of the shard hardware.
Your question does not provide sufficient information whether any of above applies in your case.
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.
We are using Mongo to host a multi-tenant application. Each tenant is going to have their own database. To get around resource utilization issues the approach that we are taking is to shard by database (as opposed to by collection - if that is the correct term to use).
This means for every x tenants we will create a new 3-node replica set. So we may have for example 1000 tenants on 1 shard and another 1000 tenants on another shard.
My question is regarding the placement of the databases for new signups. The approach we were going to take was to flag a shard as being the 'active' shard and creating all new tenants on that shard. When it reaches capacity, create a new shard, flag that as the active shard and continue on.
Can you choose which shard you create a new database on in Mongo directly? If left to Mongo, from what I understand, it will do it in round robin fashion when there is more then one shard which may leave our shards imbalanced.
Is this the right approach or is there an alternative better approach?
You can use shard tags to force some collections to reside only on specific shards. So you could, for example, tag each shard with its serial number, and tag the collections/databases you want to have on that shard with that tag, until it runs full at which point you create a new shard, increase the counter and use that for new data.
Another option then is to not enable sharding on the individual databases at all, and use the movePrimary command to force a specific shard to act as the primary shard for a specific database. Since the database won't be sharded, all its data will remain on its designated primary shard, which is exactly what you want.
That being said, it seems to me like this approach conflicts with the very concept of sharding, which is meant to evenly distribute data across multiple machines automatically.
I'm a bit confused as to how this works.
When sharding MySQL, we had some tables, usually small ones with reference data, whole in each shard. This was to enable joins.
If we have small collections in MongoDB, that we don't shard in a sharded setup, what happens to them? Do they get sent to each shard, or just stay in the first shard?
This strikes me as a possible potential bottleneck, if all processes in a heavily sharded system with many application servers were hitting on one server.
In MongoDB with the autosharding feature, a sharded collection will be distributed somehow evenly along all the shards you have.
With those collections which you not likely to shard (which are not sharded) you can specify a primary shard which will they reside on. This primary shard is a given one for a specific database, so it is on per database level. Can be moved and can be different for different databases.
There is the notion of shard tagging which with you can influence for sharded collections where to be placed. Basicly you can constraint a collection or a part of a collection to be stored on a specific set of shards. (Reference)
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/