MongoDB: Stop from storing replica set settings - mongodb

I have a local mongo database that's being populated by a script which will run for the next few days.
When it'll be done, I'm expecting its size to be quite substantial, so I want mongo to stop storing replica sets (or whatever is it doing in that database called "local"), because this is just a pet project, the database is local. I won't have any clients so I don't need replication and the database will only be used for reads after the initial data is inserted. It has the same size as my database so it's a waste of space.
I found this other thread where they just basically say to drop the local database and I did that but, every time I'm starting mongod, it's there again (and I'm not starting mongod with --replSet. Mongod doesn't even recognize that flag, btw). Could you please tell me how do I stop mongod from generating it?

Running mongod as a standalone (no --replSet option) means you won't store oplog entries or replica set related information.
The local database will be created. The size of the local database should remain static in this case. The contents should be 2 collections:
startup_log which holds static information about your mongod instance, including version, start time and startup options.
system.indexes which contains index definitions for the collections in this database. In this case it would have a single entry defining the _id index for startup_log.
To confirm yourself that these are the only 2 collections run the following from the mongo shell:
use local;
show collections;

Related

MongoDB 2.2: why didn't replication catch up a collection following a dump/restore?

We have a three-server replicaset running MongoDB 2.2 on Ubuntu 10.04, and recently had to upgrade the hard drive for each server where one particular database resides. This database contains log information for web service requests, where they write to collections in hourly buckets using the current timestamp to determine the name, e.g. log_yyyymmddhh.
I performed this process:
backup the database on the primary server with mongodump --db log_db
take a secondary server offline, replace the disk
bring the secondary server up in standalone mode (i.e. comment out the replSet entry
in /etc/mongodb.conf before starting the service)
restore the database on the secondary server with mongorestore --drop --db log_db
add the secondary server back into the replicaset and bring it online,
letting replication catch up the hourly buckets that were updated/created
while it had been offline
Everything seemed to go as expected, except that the collection which was the current bucket at the time of the backup was not brought up to date by replication. I had to manually copy that collection over by hand to get it up to date. Note that collections which were created after the backup were synched just fine.
What did I miss in this process that caused MongoDB not to get things back in synch for that one collection? I assume something got out of whack with regard to the oplog?
Edit 1:
The oplog on the primary showed that its earliest timestamp went back a couple of days, so there should have been plenty of space to maintain transactions for a few hours (which was the time the secondary was offline).
Edit 2:
Our MongoDB installation uses two disk partitions: /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1. The primary MongoDB directory /var/lib/mongodb/ is on /dev/sda1, and holds several databases, while the log database resides by itself on /dev/sdb1. There's a sym link /var/lib/mongodb/log_db which points to a directory on /dev/sdb1. Since the log db was getting full, we needed to upgrade the disk for /dev/sdb1.
You should be using mongodump with the --oplog option. Running a full database backup with mongodump on a replicaset that is updating collections at the same time may not leave you with a consistent backup. This becomes worse with larger databases, more collections and more frequent updates/inserts/deletes.
From the documentation for your version (2.2) of MongoDB (it's the same for 2.6 but just to be as accurate as possible):
--oplog
Use this option to ensure that mongodump creates a dump of the
database that includes an oplog, to create a point-in-time snapshot of
the state of a mongod instance. To restore to a specific point-in-time
backup, use the output created with this option in conjunction with
mongorestore --oplogReplay.
Without --oplog, if there are write operations during the dump
operation, the dump will not reflect a single moment in time. Changes
made to the database during the update process can affect the output
of the backup.
http://docs.mongodb.org/v2.2/reference/mongodump/
This is not covered well in most MongoDB tutorials around backups and restores. Generally you are better off if you can perform a live snapshot of the storage volume your database resides on (assuming your storage solution has a live snapshot ability compatible with MongoDB). Failing that, your next best bet is taking a secondary offline and then performing a snapshot or backup of the database files. Mongodump on a live database is increasingly a less optimal solution for larger databases due to performance issues.
I'd definitely take a look at the MongoDB overview of backup options: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/backups/
I would guess this has to do with the oplog not being long enough, although it seems like you checked that and it looked reasonably big.
Still, when adding new members to a replica set you shouldn't be snapshotting and restoring them. It's better to simply add a new member and let replication happen by itself. This is described in the Mongo docs and is the process I've always followed.

mongodb replicaset new member does not show the correct disk usage on EC2

I have a mongodb replicaset with 2 members. 1 primary and 1 secondary. if I issue show dbs, both of them are show like followings:
local 24.06640625GB
test 0.203125GB
db1 9.94921875GB
db1test 0.953125GB
and then I issue use db1 -> db.events.count(), the result return 1003130 documents on both of the members.
that makes sense they reflecting to each other and db1 and db1test on both of dbserver have the same amount of disk usage and the same amount of document in each collection.
then I decide to add a new member(a new dbserver) which has an empty /data/db. I start the new server by using:
sudo mongod --replSet rs0 --fork --logpath /var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log
then in primary server, I issue
rs.add('ipOfNewDBServer:27017')
After a few seconds. my new mongodb server shell change from > -> STARTUP2 -> rs0:SECONDARY which I think start sync.
In the new/recent added mongodb server I issue show dbs, it looks like the following:
local 22.0673828125GB
test 0.203125GB
db1 1.953125GB
db1test 0.453125GB
the disk usage of each database are not as the same as the other two(1 primary and 1 secondary). however, if I issue use db1 -> db.events.count(), the result return 1003130 which are the same as the other two. and I check the other collections in this db1. they all the same.
I wonder why database disk usage are different and the collection in each of database have the same amount of documents??? and correct me if I did anything wrong to sync the data from those two existing set to the new set. the mongodb offical document says This procedure relies on MongoDB’s regular process for initial sync, I have no ideas, please help. thanks
The new member of the replica set will have the benefit of no fragmentation as he full synchronizes to the replset. The existing replicase, very likely, have fragmentation due to deletes and document updates moving the documents.
In our environment, we periodically take each member of the replset offline, whack its data directory, and allow it to full sync to drive out fragmentation. It works for us, but our dataset may be "small" relative to other deployments. I think there is a way to do this through the console with some db.runCommand but I don't know what it is.

MongoDB Replica Sets Not Syncing?

I've been following the steps on the tutorial for deploying a replica set to a development/test environment: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/deploy-replica-set/#deploy-a-development-or-test-replica-set
I have three instances of mongod.exe running, and all three are able to connect properly.
I wanted to verify that the Secondaries are properly syncing up to the Primary when an Insert happens, but when I do an Insert, there doesn't seem to be any indication that the Secondaries are following through.
For instance, I have a MongoShell connected to the Primary and I run the commands:
db.createCollection("testCol")
db.testCol.insert( { item: "card", qty: 15 } )
This creates the 'testCol' collection and inserts a value into it.
When I do:
show collections
The 'testCol' collection shows up fine, and the item I inserted is present.
My question is: Shouldn't the Secondaries sync up with the Primary and copy the Collection and Item over?
Starting up another MongoShell and connecting to one of the Secondaries, I see that the collection I created on the Primary is not showing up.
Am I just misunderstanding how Replica Sets work, or is there something else that I need to set in order for the Secondaries to copy Insert actions?
I followed the instructions in the link I gave in the beginning, so any configurations that I have set up are exactly the same.
Well that's embarrassing.
Turns out that I was looking at the incorrect database on my side. The way that I'd configured, I needed to be using a database named test but I had been doing inserts on local.
Looking back at the setup instructions for Replica Sets, I'm not quite sure where I configured MongoShell to connect to test, but connecting to that database and making a change on the Primary seemed to fix everything.
Here's how my MongoShell connected to the Primary looked like:
MongoDB shell version: 2.4.5
connecting to: 127.0.0.1.27017/test
Maybe the connection to test was configured when I first set up MongoDB? Not too sure right now.
Doing a little more looking around, it seems like when you connect with MongoShell, it's automatically connecting to the test database. Not sure how to change parameters in the shortcut I'm using in order to have it point to a different database.
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/mongo-shell/#basic-shell-javascript-operations
In the mongo shell, db is the variable that references the current
database. The variable is automatically set to the default database
test or is set when you use the use to switch current database.
I guess this means there's no parameter you can pass in, and you have to do a use <db> manually?
Found it!
If you set up a shortcut to mongo.exe, set this as your Target:
C:\mongodb\bin\mongo.exe <db name> --host <host> --port <port>
Previously I only had the --port parameter, but adding in the rest allowed me to start directly in a specific database.

Modify and replay MongoDB oplog

Is it possible to modify the MongoDB oplog and replay it?
A bug caused an update to be applied to more documents than it was supposed to be, overwriting some data. Data was recovered from backup and reintegrated, so nothing was actually lost, but I was wondering if there was a way to modify the oplog to remove or modify the offending update and replay it.
I don't have in depth knowledge of MongoDB internals, so informative answers along the lines of, "you don't understand how it works, it's like this" will also be considered for acceptance.
One of the big issues in application or human error data corruption is that the offending write to the primary will immediately be replicated to the secondary.
This is one of the reasons that users take advantage of "slaveDelay" - an option to run one of your secondary nodes with a fixed time delay (of course that only helps you if you discover the error or bug during the time period that's shorter than the delay on that secondary).
In case you don't have such a set-up, you have to rely on a backup to recreate the state of the records you need to restore to their pre-bug state.
Perform all the operations on a separate stand-alone copy of your data - only after verifying that everything was properly recreated should you then move the corrected data into your production system.
What is required to be able to do this is a recent copy of the backup (let's say the backup is X hours old) and the oplog on your cluster must hold more than X hours worth of data. I didn't specify which node's oplog because (a) every member of the replica set has the same contents in the oplog and (b) it is possible that your oplog size is different on different node members, in which case you want to check the "largest" one.
So let's say your most recent backup is 52 hours old, but luckily you have an oplog that holds 75 hours worth of data (yay).
You already realized that all of your nodes (primary and secondaries) have the "bad" data, so what you would do is restore this most recent backup into a new mongod. This is where you will restore these records to what they were right before the offending update - and then you can just move them into the current primary from where they will get replicated to all the secondaries.
While restoring your backup, create a mongodump of your oplog collection via this command:
mongodump -d local -c oplog.rs -o oplogD
Move the oplog to its own directory renaming it to oplog.bson:
mkdir oplogR
mv oplogD/local/oplog.rs.bson oplogR/oplog.bson
Now you need to find the "offending" operation. You can dump out the oplog to human readable form, using the bsondump command on oplogR/oplog.bson file (and then use grep or what-not to find the "bad" update). Alternatively you can query against the original oplog in the replica set via use local and db.oplog.rs.find() commands in the shell.
Your goal is to find this entry and note its ts field.
It might look like this:
"ts" : Timestamp( 1361497305, 2789 )
Note that the mongorestore command has two options, one called --oplogReplay and the other called oplogLimit. You will now replay this oplog on the restored stand-alone server BUT you will stop before this offending update operation.
The command would be (host and port are where your newly restored backup is):
mongorestore -h host --port NNNN --oplogReplay --oplogLimit 1361497305:2789 oplogR
This will restore each operation from the oplog.bson file in oplogR directory stopping right before the entry with ts value Timestamp(1361497305, 2789).
Recall that the reason you were doing this on a separate instance is so you can verify the restore and replay created correct data - once you have verified it then you can write the restored records to the appropriate place in the real primary (and allow replication propagate the corrected records to the secondaries).

Auto compact the deleted space in mongodb?

The mongodb document says that
To compact this space, run db.repairDatabase() from the mongo shell (note this operation will block and is slow).
in http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Excessive+Disk+Space
I wonder how to make the mongodb free deleted disk space automatically ?
p.s. We stored many downloading task in mongodb, up to 20GB, and finished these in half an hour.
In general if you don't need to shrink your datafiles you shouldn't shrink them at all. This is because "growing" your datafiles on disk is a fairly expensive operation and the more space that MongoDB can allocate in datafiles the less fragmentation you will have.
So, you should try to provide as much disk-space as possible for the database.
However if you must shrink the database you should keep two things in mind.
MongoDB grows it's data files by
doubling so the datafiles may be
64MB, then 128MB, etc up to 2GB (at
which point it stops doubling to
keep files until 2GB.)
As with most any database ... to
do operations like shrinking you'll
need to schedule a separate job to
do so, there is no "autoshrink" in
MongoDB. In fact of the major noSQL databases
(hate that name) only Riak
will autoshrink. So, you'll need to
create a job using your OS's
scheduler to run a shrink. You could use an bash script, or have a job run a php script, etc.
Serverside Javascript
You can use server side Javascript to do the shrink and run that JS via mongo's shell on a regular bases via a job (like cron or the windows scheduling service) ...
Assuming a collection called foo you would save the javascript below into a file called bar.js and run ...
$ mongo foo bar.js
The javascript file would look something like ...
// Get a the current collection size.
var storage = db.foo.storageSize();
var total = db.foo.totalSize();
print('Storage Size: ' + tojson(storage));
print('TotalSize: ' + tojson(total));
print('-----------------------');
print('Running db.repairDatabase()');
print('-----------------------');
// Run repair
db.repairDatabase()
// Get new collection sizes.
var storage_a = db.foo.storageSize();
var total_a = db.foo.totalSize();
print('Storage Size: ' + tojson(storage_a));
print('TotalSize: ' + tojson(total_a));
This will run and return something like ...
MongoDB shell version: 1.6.4
connecting to: foo
Storage Size: 51351
TotalSize: 79152
-----------------------
Running db.repairDatabase()
-----------------------
Storage Size: 40960
TotalSize: 65153
Run this on a schedule (during none peak hours) and you are good to go.
Capped Collections
However there is one other option, capped collections.
Capped collections are fixed sized
collections that have a very high
performance auto-FIFO age-out feature
(age out is based on insertion order).
They are a bit like the "RRD" concept
if you are familiar with that.
In addition, capped collections
automatically, with high performance,
maintain insertion order for the
objects in the collection; this is
very powerful for certain use cases
such as logging.
Basically you can limit the size of (or number of documents in ) a collection to say .. 20GB and once that limit is reached MongoDB will start to throw out the oldest records and replace them with newer entries as they come in.
This is a great way to keep a large amount of data, discarding the older data as time goes by and keeping the same amount of disk-space used.
I have another solution that might work better than doing db.repairDatabase() if you can't afford for the system to be locked, or don't have double the storage.
You must be using a replica set.
My thought is once you've removed all of the excess data that's gobbling your disk, stop a secondary replica, wipe its data directory, start it up and let it resynchronize with the master.
The process is time consuming, but it should only cost a few seconds of down time, when you do the rs.stepDown().
Also this can not be automated. Well it could, but I don't think I'm willing to try.
Running db.repairDatabase() will require that you have space equal to the current size of the database available on the file system. This can be bothersome when you know that the collections left or data you need to retain in the database would currently use much less space than what is allocated and you do not have enough space to make the repair.
As an alternative if you have few collections you actually need to retain or only want a subset of the data, then you can move the data you need to keep into a new database and drop the old one. If you need the same database name you can then move them back into a fresh db by the same name. Just make sure you recreate any indexes.
use cleanup_database
db.dropDatabase();
use oversize_database
db.collection.find({},{}).forEach(function(doc){
db = db.getSiblingDB("cleanup_database");
db.collection_subset.insert(doc);
});
use oversize_database
db.dropDatabase();
use cleanup_database
db.collection_subset.find({},{}).forEach(function(doc){
db = db.getSiblingDB("oversize_database");
db.collection.insert(doc);
});
use oversize_database
<add indexes>
db.collection.ensureIndex({field:1});
use cleanup_database
db.dropDatabase();
An export/drop/import operation for databases with many collections would likely achieve the same result but I have not tested.
Also as a policy you can keep permanent collections in a separate database from your transient/processing data and simply drop the processing database once your jobs complete. Since MongoDB is schema-less, nothing except indexes would be lost and your db and collections will be recreated when the inserts for the processes run next. Just make sure your jobs include creating any nessecary indexes at an appropriate time.
If you are using replica sets, which were not available when this question was originally written, then you can set up a process to automatically reclaim space without incurring significant disruption or performance issues.
To do so, you take advantage of the automatic initial sync capabilities of a secondary in a replica set. To explain: if you shut down a secondary, wipe its data files and restart it, the secondary will re-sync from scratch from one of the other nodes in the set (by default it picks the node closest to it by looking at ping response times). When this resync occurs, all data is rewritten from scratch (including indexes), effectively do the same thing as a repair, and disk space it reclaimed.
By running this on secondaries (and then stepping down the primary and repeating the process) you can effectively reclaim disk space on the whole set with minimal disruption. You do need to be careful if you are reading from secondaries, since this will take a secondary out of rotation for a potentially long time. You also want to make sure your oplog window is sufficient to do a successful resync, but that is generally something you would want to make sure of whether you do this or not.
To automate this process you would simply need to have a script run to perform this action on separate days (or similar) for each member of your set, preferably during your quiet time or maintenance window. A very naive version of this script would look like this in bash:
NOTE: THIS IS BASICALLY PSEUDO CODE - FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES ONLY - DO NOT USE FOR PRODUCTION SYSTEMS WITHOUT SIGNIFICANT CHANGES
#!/bin/bash
# First arg is host MongoDB is running on, second arg is the MongoDB port
MONGO=/path/to/mongo
MONGOHOST=$1
MONGOPORT=$2
DBPATH = /path/to/dbpath
# make sure the node we are connecting to is not the primary
while (`$MONGO --quiet --host $MONGOHOST --port $MONGOPORT --eval 'db.isMaster().ismaster'`)
do
`$MONGO --quiet --host $MONGOHOST --port $MONGOPORT --eval 'rs.stepDown()'`
sleep 2
done
echo "Node is no longer primary!\n"
# Now shut down that server
# something like (assuming user is set up for key based auth and has password-less sudo access a la ec2-user in EC2)
ssh -t user#$MONGOHOST sudo service mongodb stop
# Wipe the data files for that server
ssh -t user#$MONGOHOST sudo rm -rf $DBPATH
ssh -t user#$MONGOHOST sudo mkdir $DBPATH
ssh -t user#$MONGOHOST sudo chown mongodb:mongodb $DBPATH
# Start up server again
# similar to shutdown something like
ssh -t user#$MONGOHOST sudo service mongodb start