My team will deploy a new version of our app (Capture social media posts, hashtags etc.) they create a different DB for each user and we may have thousands of collections on each DB. I read all mongoDB shard documentation and I saw that I can only shard an collection or one DB at time, I'm missing something ?
We will start this new version fresh, without any databases and we will grow from 0 again (For now, we have 23k users) but we will escalate this number really quickly (100.000+ at the end of the year)
My question is: I really need a Shard cluster ? (My test setup have 3 shards with 3 microshards, 3 config servers and 2 mongos) for now, in production, i have a large server doing all the hard work but i dont want to scale to top, the horizontal scale is the best choice, i think.
Can I shard all my databases automatically or I really need to do that one by one doing the shard key procedure and so. ?
Thanks in advance
You are reading correctly. What you intend to do is so far away from what any sensible person would do that MongoDB doesn't offer any tools to support this. If you really want to go with this WTF solution, your application will be responsible to set up sharding for each collection it creates. This forces you to give administration permission to the application (despite what any security guides recommend).
"Will you really need a sharded cluster" - that depends on how much data you will have and how often you query it with what kind of query. But it is unlikely to work anyway, because your sharded cluster will have to manage (100,000 databases* 1.000 collections) = a hundred million collections. MongoDB is not designed for scaling in that direction. The cluster will likely be so busy with bookkeeping that you won't really see any notable performance gain.
It is also questionable if clustering would even theoretically make sense. Clustering is usually only useful when you have very large collections. But in your scenario where your data is so heavily fragmented into a million collections, each individual collection is unlikely to be very large.
If you really want to go this route, it might in fact be a better solution to separate the databases physically by assigning each user to a database server.
Or you could just build a database architecture like a normal team would with one database for all users and one collection per type of document. You would then speed up lookups by creating a compound index on user and whatever criteria you used to tell which database a document belonged to. This index might also be a good shard key.
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I am designing a system with MongoDb (64 bit version) to handle a large amount of users (around 100,000) and each user will have large amounts of data (around 1 million records).
What is the best strategy of design?
Dump all records in single collection
Have a collection for each user
Have a database for each user.
Many Thanks,
So you're looking at somewhere in the region of 100 billion records (1 million records * 100,000 users).
The preferred way to deal with large amounts of data is to create a sharded cluster that splits the data out over several servers that are presented as single logical unit via the mongo client.
Therefore the answer to your question is put all your records in a single sharded collection.
The number of shards required and configuration of the cluster is related to the size of the data and other factors such as the quantity and distribution of reads and writes. The answers to those questions are probably very specific to your unique situation, so I won't attempt to guess them.
I'd probably start by deciding how many shards you have the time and machines available to set up and testing the system on a cluster of that many machines. Based on the performance of that, you can decide whether you need more or fewer shards in your cluster
So you are looking for 100,000,000 detail records overall for 100K users?
What many people don't seem to understand is that MongoDB is good at horizontal scaling. Horizontal scaling is normally classed as scaling huge single collections of data across many (many) servers in a huge cluster.
So already if you use a single collection for common data (i.e. one collection called user and one called detail) you are suiting MongoDBs core purpose and build.
MongoDB, as mentioned, by others is not so good at scaling vertically across many collections. It has a nssize limit to begin with and even though 12K initial collections is estimated in reality due to index size you can have as little as 5K collections in your database.
So a collection per user is not feasible at all. It would be using MongoDB against its core principles.
Having a database per user involves the same problems, maybe more, as having singular collections per user.
I have never encountered some one not being able to scale MongoDB to the billions or even close to the 100s of billions (or maybe beyond) on a optimised set-up, however, I do not see why it cannot; after all Facebook is able to make MySQL scale into the 100s of billions per user (across 32K+ shards) for them and the sharding concept is similar between the two databases.
So the theory and possibility of doing this is there. It is all about choosing the right schema and shard concept and key (and severs and network etc etc etc etc).
If you were to witness problems you could go for splitting archive collections, or deleted items away from the main collection but I think that is overkill, instead you want to make sure that MongoDB knows where each segment of your huge dataset is at any given point in time on the master and ensure that this data is always hot, that way queries that don't do a global and scatter OP should be quite fast.
About a collection on each users:
By default configuration, MongoDB is limited to 12k collections. You can increase the size of this with --nssize but it's not unlimited.
And you have to count index into this 12k. (check "namespaces" concept on mongo documentation).
About a database for each user:
For a model point of view, that's very curious.
For technical, there is no limit on mongo, but you probably have a limit with file descriptor (limit from you OS/settings).
So as #Rohit says, the two last are not good.
Maybe you should explain more about your case.
Maybe you can cut users into different collections (ex: one for each first letter of name etc., or for each service of the company...).
And, of course use sharding.
Edit: maybe MongoDb is not the best database for your use case.
I'm a beginner with a non SQL structure like here with MongoDB and I don't find somebody talk about a collection with lots of data, like 1.000.000 entries ? and more ?
I saw a company page on the official site. But nothing with large data companies.
I heard about a combo with SQL : Large data are stocked on SQL tables, and only the "cache" are on MongoDB, but it's the only one solution for MongoDB and large data ?
We're using MongoDB to power Where's it Up, and the api behind it. We're currently pushing in >3 million documents per day. MongoDB is the only storage engine in use. We were keeping a bunch around for a while, but we're now using TTL to delete old records.
Things are going super well, just make sure you have all the indexes you need. Querying a million+ records without an index is bad, regardless of your storage engine. Auto-failover has been super helpful.
Something to watch out for is updating records to include more information, it can be pretty expensive if the document grows past pre-allocated space. We ended up changing how we stored data to avoid updates, and create new documents instead.
MongoDB in it's current incarnation is explicitly designed to make it easy to scale out.
As for the numbers: one of my test databases has 10M records and runs easily on my MacBook Air, which is 4 years old now.
So what you can do when your current cluster can not handle the data stored (either because the indices are too big for your RAM or because of processing the queries takes too long): add another node to your MongoDB cluster. Your performance gain should be something between slightly below linear (if your cluster was in perfect condition otherwise) up to several orders of magnitude (when indices didn't fit into RAM and/or IO was pushed to it's limits before and that situation changed after scaling out).
A word of warning: you should have somebody who knows about MongoDB administration in case you want to put you deployment into production. Though MongoDB administration seems to be easy, it is by no means something to be done by a layman. Especially not for production use.
I'm new to mongodb and I'm facing a dilemma regarding my DB Schema design:
Should I create one single collection or put my data into several collections (we could call these categories I suppose).
Now I know many such questions have been asked, but I believe my case is different for 2 reasons:
If I go for many collections, I'll have to create about 120 and that's it. This won't grow in the future.
I know I'll never need to query or insert into multiple collections. I will always have to query only one, since a document in collection X is not related to any document stored in the other collections. Documents may hold references to other parts of the DB though (like userId etc).
So my question is: could the 120 collections improve query performance? Is this a useful optimization in my case?
Or should I just go for single collection + sharding?
Each collection is expected hold millions of documents. If use only one, it will store billions of docs.
Thanks in advance!
------- Edit:
Thanks for the great answers.
In fact the 120 collections is only a self made limit, it's not really optimal:
The data in the collections is related to web publishers. There could be millions of these (any web site can join).
I guess the ideal situation would be if I could create a collection for each publisher (to hold their data only). But obviously, this is not possible due to mongo limitations.
So I came up with the idea of a fixed number of collections to at least distribute the data somehow. Like: collection "A_XX" would hold XX Platform related data for publishers whose names start with "A".. etc. We'll only support a few of these platforms, so 120 collections should be more than enough.
On another website someone suggested using many databases instead of many collections. But this means overhead and then I would have to use / manage many different connections.
What do you think about this? Is there a better solution?
Sorry for not being specific enough in my original question.
Thanks in advance
Single Sharded Collection
The edited version of the question makes the actual requirement clearer: you have a collection that can potentially grow very large and you want an approach to partition the data. The artificial collection limit is your own planned partitioning scheme.
In that case, I think you would be best off using a single collection and taking advantage of MongoDB's auto-sharding feature to distribute the data and workload to multiple servers as required. Multiple collections is still a valid approach, but unnecessarily complicates your application code & deployment versus leveraging core MongoDB features. Assuming you choose a good shard key, your data will be automatically balanced across your shards.
You can do not have to shard immediately; you can defer the decision until you see your workload actually requiring more write scale (but knowing the option is there when you need it). You have other options before deciding to shard as well, such as upgrading your servers (disks and memory in particular) to better support your workload. Conversely, you don't want to wait until your system is crushed by workload before sharding so you definitely need to monitor the growth. I would suggest using the free MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) provided by 10gen.
On another website someone suggested using many databases instead of many collections. But this means overhead and then I would have to use / manage many different connections.
Multiple databases will add significantly more administrative overhead, and would likely be overkill and possibly detrimental for your use case. Storage is allocated at the database level, so 120 databases would be consuming much more space than a single database with 120 collections.
Fixed number of collections (original answer)
If you can plan for a fixed number of collections (120 as per your original question description), I think it makes more sense to take this approach rather than using a monolithic collection.
NOTE: the design considerations below still apply, but since the question was updated to clarify that multiple collections are an attempted partitioning scheme, sharding a single collection would be a much more straightforward approach.
The motivations for using separate collections would be:
Your documents for a single large collection will likely have to include some indication of the collection subtype, which may need to be added to multiple indexes and could significantly increase index sizes. With separate collections the subtype is already implicit in the collection namespace.
Sharding is enabled at the collection level. A single large collection only gives you an "all or nothing" approach, whereas individual collections allow you to control which subset(s) of data need to be sharded and choose more appropriate shard keys.
You can use the compact to command to defragment individual collections. Note: compact is a blocking operation, so the normal recommendation for a HA production environment would be to deploy a replica set and use rolling maintenance (i.e. compact the secondaries first, then step down and compact the primary).
MongoDB 2.4 (and 2.2) currently have database-level write lock granularity. In practice this has not proven a problem for the vast majority of use cases, however multiple collections would allow you to more easily move high activity collections into separate databases if needed.
Further to the previous point .. if you have your data in separate collections, these will be able to take advantage of future improvements in collection-level locking (see SERVER-1240 in the MongoDB Jira issue tracker).
The main problem here is that you will gain very little performance in the current MongoDB versions if you separate out collections into the same database. To get any sort of extra performance over a single collection setup you would need to move the collections out into separate databases, then you will have operational overhead for judging what database you should query etc.
So yes, you could go for 120 collections easily however, you won't really gain anything currently due to: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1240 not being implemented (anytime soon).
Housing billions of documents in a single collection isn't too bad. I presume that even if you was to house this in separate collections it probably would not be on a single server either, just like sharding a single collection, so any speed reduction due to multi server setup will also not matter in this case.
In my personal opinion, using a single collection is easier on everything.
I am building a site with users who have discussions and write blogs and plan to use MongoDB as the database for the site. Which architecture option would be more efficient and allow for easier data flow between them:
One Database with a Blogs Collection, a Discussions Collection, and a User Activity Collection? Each collection would be sharded as appropriate.
A Blogs Database, a Discussions Database, and a User Activity Database? Each database would be broken into collections and sha rded as appropriate.
It won't make a big difference whether you put everything into a single database or into multiple databases until you find you need to do something that's handled on the database level, for example access control, or placing database files on separate physical devices (to reduce I/O contention).
In addition, currently locking granularity is on the database level so if you happen to have a very large number of small writes having them go to different databases will mean that they will not be contending for the same lock. Since you anticipate sharding you can also place each database on a different shard which may allow you to defer actually needing to shard any particular collection as each shard would only be handling the traffic for that database's collection(s).
I would say if you are in doubt go ahead and put them in separate databases, it's unlikely to hurt and it may help.
Mongo will work, but getting familiar with it may take time depending on your experience.
If you use MySQL (or another SQL db) you may have an easier time. You should probably just create separate tables for your blogs, discussions, and activity, rather than multiple databases.
Another factor to consider is the size of your databases. An SQL database is fine for most applications, even fairly large ones. MongoDB (and other NoSQL db's) are great for scaling big data.
Hope this helps!
I need to load 6.6 billion bigrams into a collection but I can't find any information on the best way to do this.
Loading that many documents onto a single primary key index would take forever but as far as I'm aware mongo doesn't support the equivalent of partitioning?
Would sharding help? Should I try and split the data set over many collections and build that logic into my application?
It's hard to say what the optimal bulk insert is -- this partly depends on the size of the objects you're inserting and other immeasurable factors. You could try a few ranges and see what gives you the best performance. As an alternative, some people like using mongoimport, which is pretty fast, but your import data needs to be json or csv. There's obviously mongodrestore, if the data is in BSON format.
Mongo can easily handle billions of documents and can have billions of documents in the one collection but remember that the maximum document size is 16mb. There are many folk with billions of documents in MongoDB and there's lots of discussions about it on the MongoDB Google User Group. Here's a document on using a large number of collections that you may like to read, if you change your mind and want to have multiple collections instead. The more collections you have, the more indexes you will have also, which probably isn't what you want.
Here's a presentation from Craigslist on inserting billions of documents into MongoDB and the guy's blogpost.
It does look like sharding would be a good solution for you but typically sharding is used for scaling across multiple servers and a lot of folk do it because they want to scale their writes or they are unable to keep their working set (data and indexes) in RAM. It is perfectly reasonable to start off with a single server and then move to a shard or replica-set as your data grows or you need extra redundancy and resilience.
However, there are other users use multiple mongods to get around locking limits of a single mongod with lots of writes. It's obvious but still worth saying but a multi-mongod setup is more complex to manage than a single server. If your IO or cpu isn't maxed out here, your working set is smaller than RAM and your data is easy to keep balanced (pretty randomly distributed), you should see improvement (with sharding on a single server). As a FYI, there is potential for memory and IO contention. With 2.2 having improved concurrency with db locking, I suspect that there will be much less of a reason for such a deployment.
You need to plan your move to sharding properly, i.e. think carefully about choosing your shard key. If you go this way then it's best to pre-split and turn off the balancer. It will be counter-productive to be moving data around to keep things balanced which means you will need to decide up front how to split it. Additionally, it is sometimes important to design your documents with the idea that some field will be useful for sharding on, or as a primary key.
Here's some good links -
Choosing a Shard Key
Blog post on shard keys
Overview presentation on sharding
Presentation on Sharding Best Practices
You can absolutely shard data in MongoDB (which partitions across N servers on the shard key). In fact, that's one of it's core strengths. There is no need to do that in your application.
For most use cases, I would strongly recommend doing that for 6.6 billion documents. In my experience, MongoDB performs better with a number of mid-range servers rather than one large one.