In MongoDB documentation, here, it has been mentioned that in a replica set even with majority readConcern we would achieve eventual consistency. I am wondering how is this possible when we have majority in both reads and writes which leads to a quorum (R+W>N) in our distributed system? I expect a strong consistent system in this setting. This is the technique which Cassandra uses as well in order to achieve strong consistency.
Can someone clarify this for me please?
MongoDb is not regarded very well in terms of strong consistency. If you have a typical sharded and replicated setup to increase consistency will need to trade off some of the performance of the db. As you know you can execute write operations only on the master of the replica set. By default you can only read from it as well. This is possibly the strongest consistency you can get from MongoDb AFAIK as the other nodes are used only for replication, failover and availability reasons. And you could read from the secondary nodes only for operations where having the latest data is not crucial and for long-running operations, such as aggregation for example.
If you set up sharding you could offload a big portion of the read/write operations to different primary nodes. I think that when it comes to MongoDb that is all you could do in order to increasing consistency and performance in particular for larger data sets.
I know we can't write to a secondary in MongoDB. But I can't find any technical reason why. In my case, I don't really care if there is a slight delay but write to a secondary might be faster. Please provide some reference if you can. Thanks!!
The reason why you can not write to a secondary is the way replication works:
Secondaries connect to a special collection on the primary, called oplog. This oplog contains operations which were run through the query optimizer. Basically, the oplog is a capped collection, and the secondaries use a tailable cursor to access it's entries and processes it from the oldest to the newest.
When a election takes place because the primary goes down / steps down, the secondary with the most recent oplog entry is elected primary. The secondaries connect to the new primary, query for the oplog entries they haven't processed yet and the cluster is in sync.
This procedure is pretty straight forward. Now imagine one could write to a secondary. All nodes in the cluster would have to have a tailable cursor on all other nodes of the cluster, and maintaining a consistent state in case of one machine failing becomes a very complicated and in case of a failure even race condition dependent thing. Effectively, there could be no guarantee even for eventual consistency any more. It would be a more or less a gamble.
That being said: A replica set is not for load balancing. A replica sets purpose is to enhance the availability and durability of the data. Because reading from a secondary is a non-risky thing, MongoDB made it possible, according to their dogma of offering the maximum of possible features without compromising scalability (which would be severely hampered if one could write to secondaries).
But MongoDB does provide a load balancing feature: sharding. Choosing the right shard key, you can distribute read and write load over (almost) as many shards as you want. Not to mention that you can provide a lot more of the precious RAM for a reasonable price when sharding.
There is a one liner answer:
Multi-master replication is a hairball.
If you was allowed to write to secondaries MongoDB would have to use milti-master replication to ge this working: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-master_replication where essentially evey node copies to each other the OPs (operations) they have received and somehow do it without losing data.
This form of replication has many obsticles to overcome.
One would be throughput; remember that OPs need to transfer across the entire network so it is possible you might actually lose throughput while adding consistentcy problems. So getting better throughput would be a problem. It is much having a secondary, taking all of the primaries OPs and then its own for replication outbound and then asking it to do yet another job.
Adding consistentcy over a distributed set like this would also be hazardous, one main question that bugs MongoDB when asking if a member is down or is: "Is it really down or just unavailable?". It is almost impossible to ensure true consistentcy in a distributed set like this, at the very least tricky.
Those are just two problems immediately.
Essentially, to sum up, MongoDB does not yet possess mlti-master replication. It could in the future but I would not be jumping for joy if it does, I will most likely ignore such a feature, normal replication and sharding in both ACID and non-ACID databases causes enough blood pressure.
I have a Mongo cluster that backs an application that I use in production. It's very important to my business and clustered across a number of boxes to optimize for speed and redundancy. I'd like to make the data in said cluster available for running analytical queries and enqueued tasks, but I definitely don't want these to harm production performance. Is it possible to just mirror all of my data against a single box I throw into the cluster with some special tag that I can then use for analytics? It's fine if it's slow. I just want it to be cheap and not to affect production read/write speeds.
Since you're talking about redundancy, I assume you have a replica set.
In that case you can use a hidden replica set member to perform the calculations you need.
Just keep in mind that the member count must be odd. If you add a node you might need to also add an arbiter. Or maybe you can just hide one of the already existing members.
If you are looking for a way to increase querying speed having a lot of data, you have to look might look into sharding with mongodb. Basically what it does is dividing your big amount of data into small shards and stores them on different machines.
If you are looking to increase redundancy (in order to make backup or to be able to do offline processing without touching primary servers) you have to look into replication with mongodb. If you are doing replication, keep in mind that the data on the replicas will be always lagging behind a primary (nothing to worry about, but just need to know this fact to decide can you allow read from the replicas). As it was pointed by Rafa, hidden replica sets are well suited for backup and offline data processing. They will still be able to get all the data from primary (with small lag), but are invisible to secondary reads and can not become primary.
There is a nice mongodb course which is talking in depth about replication and sharding, so may be it is worth listening and trying it.
I have two shards on three machines (using mongodb 1.8.2):
nodeI including: shard1(primary) and shard2(primary)
nodeII including: shard1(secondary) and shard2(secondary)
nodeIII including: shard1(arbiter) and shard2 (arbiter)
NodeII load is getting very high(CPU and IO), and NodeI is high as well, but a little better than nodeII.
In my java client I designated code to only query NodeII, while NodeI is just used for writing.
I am planning to convert nodeIII from arbiter to secondary to share the read load on NodeII.
Do you think this is a good idea and if I do this, what should I consider, or do you have other suggestions to lower the load?
As long as the arbiter hardware has similar specifications to your secondary, the approach you are suggesting seems reasonable as it will distribute the secondary reads. Usually arbiters have very low hardware specs or are on shared hardware, but I am assuming that this is not the case in your configuration.
If you have an odd number of servers in the replica set you will no longer need an arbiter.
You may want to look into Read Preference here, in particular you might be interested in specifying tag sets to select a secondary.
Reading from a secondary does not necessarily "distribute" the load as you might expect. Without getting to the root of your performance problems, you may just be setting up for more challenges.
In particular, adding a secondary to your existing servers will:
increase the I/O load on the server where you add the secondary (you are now replicating & writing a full extra copy of the data)
provide more contention for reading from the server the secondary is syncing from
potentially cause that secondary to lag behind the primary during heavy read activity (which may be of concern if you are expecting strong consistency).
You should also consider what happens in the case of failure. If your servers are struggling under the current load, things will probably dramatically melt down if any one of your physical servers has problems and all the traffic ends up hitting a single server.
Ideally you should run mongostat or similar monitoring tools to get a better understanding of the performance characteristics of your servers and what might be contributing to the load (memory pressure, lock %, I/O, network, ..). It would be helpful if you could post a sampling of mongostat output to PasteBin or similar.
You should also review your common queries with explain() to understand index usage, and check if they require access to all shards or are being directed to a specific one.
If all 3 servers are the same hardware spec, as a short term improvement I would consider:
Removing the arbiters and replace them with secondary nodes. This will provide extra data redundancy in the event one of your servers fails and help prevent all of the load from landing on one server.
Stepping down the primary on NodeI, so that NodeI and NodeII each have a primary and secondary (rather than the two primaries on NodeI and two secondaries on NodeII). The primary and secondary servers have different write characteristics so this may balance the load better.
Checking your shard key(s) and common queries to confirm they will reasonably balance reads and writes. Potential problems including a "hot spot" where all writes to a collection hit a single shard .. or queries which hit all shards to get a result.
Testing the change in performance if you don't read from the secondaries. It may seem counter-intuitive, but reading from secondaries may actually be causing you other issues depending on the nature of your queries.
Lastly, you mention using 1.8.2. There are significant performance and locking/yielding improvements in MongoDB 2.0 and 2.2, as well as other bug fixes. It would be worth testing an upgrade in your development environment as this may address some of your issues.
Replication seems to be a lot simpler than sharding, unless I am missing the benefits of what sharding is actually trying to achieve. Don't they both provide horizontal scaling?
In the context of scaling MongoDB:
replication creates additional copies of the data and allows for automatic failover to another node. Replication may help with horizontal scaling of reads if you are OK to read data that potentially isn't the latest.
sharding allows for horizontal scaling of data writes by partitioning data across multiple servers using a shard key. It's important to choose a good shard key. For example, a poor choice of shard key could lead to "hot spots" of data only being written on a single shard.
A sharded environment does add more complexity because MongoDB now has to manage distributing data and requests between shards -- additional configuration and routing processes are added to manage those aspects.
Replication and sharding are typically combined to created a sharded cluster where each shard is supported by a replica set.
From a client application point of view you also have some control in relation to the replication/sharding interaction, in particular:
Read preferences
Write concerns
Consider you have a great music collection on your hard disk, you store the music in logical order based on year of release in different folders.
You are concerned that your collection will be lost if drive fails.
So you get a new disk and occasionally copy the entire collection keeping the same folder structure.
Sharding >> Keeping your music files in different folders
Replication >> Syncing your collection to other drives
Replication is a mostly traditional master/slave setup, data is synced to backup members and if the primary fails one of them can take its place. It is a reasonably simple tool. It's primarily meant for redundancy, although you can scale reads by adding replica set members. That's a little complicated, but works very well for some apps.
Sharding sits on top of replication, usually. "Shards" in MongoDB are just replica sets with something called a "router" in front of them. Your application will connect to the router, issue queries, and it will decide which replica set (shard) to forward things on to. It's significantly more complex than a single replica set because you have the router and config servers to deal with (these keep track of what data is stored where).
If you want to scale Mongo horizontally, you'd shard. 10gen likes to call the router/config server setup auto-sharding. It's possible to do a more ghetto form of sharding where you have the app decide which DB to write to as well.
Sharding
Sharding is a technique of splitting up a large collection amongst multiple servers. When we shard, we deploy multiple mongod servers. And in the front, mongos which is a router. The application talks to this router. This router then talks to various servers, the mongods. The application and the mongos are usually co-located on the same server. We can have multiple mongos services running on the same machine. It's also recommended to keep set of multiple mongods (together called replica set), instead of one single mongod on each server. A replica set keeps the data in sync across several different instances so that if one of them goes down, we won't lose any data. Logically, each replica set can be seen as a shard. It's transparent to the application, the way MongoDB chooses to shard is we choose a shard key.
Assume, for student collection we have stdt_id as the shard key or it could be a compound key. And the mongos server, it's a range based system. So based on the stdt_id that we send as the shard key, it'll send the request to the right mongod instance.
So, what do we need to really know as a developer?
insert must include a shard key, so if it's a multi-parted shard key, we must include the entire shard key
we've to understand what the shard key is on collection itself
for an update, remove, find - if mongos is not given a shard key - then it's going to have to broadcast the request to all the different shards that cover the collection.
for an update - if we don't specify the entire shard key, we have to make it a multi update so that it knows that it needs to broadcast it
Whenever you're thinking about sharding or replication, you need to think in the context of writers/update operations. If you don't need to scale writes then replications, as it fairly simpler, is a good choice for you.
On the other hand, if you workload mostly updates/writes then at some point you'll hit a write bottleneck. If write request comes Mongo blocks other writes request. Those write request blocks until the first request will be done. If you want to scale this writes and want parallelize it then you need to implement sharding.
Just to put this somewhere...
The most basic way to run mongo is as standalone server.
You write a config (file or cli options)
initiate the server using mongod
For this picture, I didn't include the "client". Check the next one.
A replica set is a set of servers initialized exactly as above with a different config file.
To link them, we connect to one of them, and initialize the replica set mode.
They will mirror each other (in the most common configuration). This system guarantees high availability of data.
The initialization of the replica set is represented in the red border box.
Sharding is not about replicating data, but about fragmenting data.
Each fragment of data is called chunk and goes to a different shard. shard = each replica set.
"main" server, running mongos instead of mongod. This is a router for queries from the client.
Obvious: The trade-off is a more complex architecture.
Novelty: configuration server (again, a different config file).
There is much more to add, but apart from the words the pictures hold much the same.
Even mongoDB recommends to study your case carefully before going sharding. Vertical scaling (vs) is probably a good idea at least once before horizontal scaling (hs).
vs is done upgrading hardware (cpu, ram, etc). hs is needs more computers (but could be cheap computers).
Both replication and sharding can be used (individually or together) for horizontal scaling of a MongoDB installation.
Sharding is MongoDB's solution for meeting the demands of data growth. Sharding stores data records across multiple servers to provide faster throughput on read and write queries, particularly for very large data sets.
Any of the servers in the sharded cluster can respond to a read or write operation, which greatly speeds up query responses.
Replication is MongoDB's solution for providing stability, backup, and disaster recovery to a MongoDB installation. This process copies and synchronizes the replica data set across multiple servers. This prevents downtime if one server goes offline.
Any of the secondary servers can respond to read queries, but only the primary server will perform write operations. The results of the write operation will then be propagated out to the secondary servers.
Scenario 1: Fault-Tolerance
In this scenario, the user is storing billing data in a MongoDB installation. This data is mission-critical to the user's business, and needs to be available 24/7, even if a server crashes or is taken offline.
MongoDB replication is the best solution for this user. With replication, the entire data set is mirrored on multiple servers. If a server fails or is taken offline, the other servers in the cluster take over.
Scenario 2: High Performance
In this scenario, the user is running a social networking site which is run from a MongoDB database. As the social network grows, the MongoDB data set has grown along with it. The user is seeing query times and page loads increase beyond an acceptable point. It is critical that the user's MongoDB installation receives a major performance boost.
Setting up a sharded MongoDB cluster is the best solution for this user. The sharded cluster will break up the user's data set and store parts of it on separate secondary servers. Each secondary server can respond to read or write queries on its portion of the data, which greatly increases the installation's response time
MongoDB Atlas is a Database as a service in could. It support three major cloud providers such as Azure , AWS and GCP. In cloud environment , we usually talk about high availability and scalability. In Atlas “clusters”, can be either a replica set or a sharded cluster.
These two address high availability and scalability features of our cloud environment.
In general Cluster is a group of servers used to achieve a specific task. So sharded clusters are used to store data in across multiple machines to meet the demand of data growth. As the size of the data increases, a single machine may not be sufficient to store the data nor provide an acceptable read and write throughput. Sharded clusters supports the horizontal scalability of the underling cloud environment.
A replica set in MongoDB is a group of mongod processes that maintain the same data set. Replica sets provide redundancy and high availability, and are the basis for all production deployments.In a replica, one node is a primary node that receives all write operations. All other instances, such as secondaries, apply operations from the primary so that they have the same data set. Replica set mainly focus on the availability of data.
Please check the documentation
Thank You.