Using Large number of collections in MongoDB - mongodb

I am considering MongoDB to hold data of our campaign logs,
{
"domain" : ""
"log_time" : ""
"email" : ""
"event_type" : "",
"data" : {
"campaign_id" : "",
"campaign_name" : "",
"message" : "",
"subscriber_id" : ""
}
}
The above one is our event structure, each event is associated with one domain,
one domain can contain any number of events and there is no relation between one domain to another domain
most of our queries are specific to one domain at a time
for quick query responses I'm planning to create one collection per one domain so that I can query on particular domain collection data instead of query on whole data which contains all domains data
we will have at least 100k+ domains in the future, so I need to create 100k+ collections.
We are expecting 1 million + documents per collection.
our main intention is index on only required collections, we don't want to index on whole data, that is why we are planning to have one collection per one domain
which approach is better for my case
1.Storing all domains events in one collection
(or)
2.Each domain events in separate collection
I have seen some questions on max number of collections that mongodb can support but I didn't get clarity on this topic , as far I know we can extend default limit size 24k, but if I create 100k+ collections what about performance will it get affect
Is this solution (using max number of collections) right approach for my case
Please suggest about my approach, thanks in advance

Without some hard numbers, this question would be probably just opinion based.
However, if you do some calculations with the numbers you provided, you will get to a solution.
So your total document count is:
100 K collections x 1M documents = 100 G (100.000.000.000) documents.
From your document structure, I'm going to do a rough estimate and say that the average size for each document will be 240 bytes (it may be even higher).
Multiplying those two numbers you get ~21.82 TB of data. You can't store this amount of data just one one server, so you will have to split your data across multiple servers.
With this amount of data, your problem isn't anymore one collection vs multiple collections, but rather, how do I store all of this data in MongoDB on multiple servers, so I can efficiently do my queries.
If you have 100K collections, you can probably do some manual work and store e.g. 10 K collections per MongoDB server. But there's a better way.
You can use sharding and let the MongoDB do the hard work of splitting your data across servers. With sharding, you will have one collection for all domains and then shard that collection across multiple servers.
I would strongly recommend you to read all documentation regarding sharding, before trying to deploy a system of this size.

Related

mongodb - combining multiple collections, but each individual query might not need all columns

Here is the scenario :
We have 2 tables (issues, anomalies) in BigQuery, which we plan to combine into a single document in MongoDB, since the 2 collections (issues, anomalies) is data about particular site.
[
{
"site": "abc",
"issues": {
--- issues data --
},
"anomalies": {
-- anomalies data --
}
}
]
There are some queries which require the 'issues' data, while others require 'anomalies' data.
In the future, we might need to show 'issues' & 'anomalies' data together, which is the reason why i'm planning to combine the two in a single document.
Questions on the approach above, wrt performance/volume of data read:
When we read the combined document, is there a way to read only specific columns (so the data volume read is not huge) ?
Or does this mean that when we read the document, the entire document is loaded in memory ?
Pls let me know.
tia!
UPDATE :
going over the mongoDB docs, we can use projections to pull only the required data from mongoDB documents.
Also, in this case - the data that is transferred over the network is only the data the specific fields that is read.
However the mongoDB server will still have to select the specific fields from the documents.

Which mongo document schema/structure is correct?

I have two document formats which I can't decide is the mongo way of doing things. Are the two examples equivalent? The idea is to search by userId and have userId be indexed. It seems to me the performance will be equal for either schemas.
multiple bookmarks as separate documents in a collection:
{
userId: 123,
bookmarkName: "google",
bookmarkUrl: "www.google.com"
},
{
userId: 123,
bookmarkName: "yahoo",
bookmarkUrl: "www.yahoo.com"
},
{
userId: 456,
bookmarkName: "google",
bookmarkUrl: "www.google.com"
}
multiple bookmarks within one document per user.
{
userId: 123,
bookmarks:[
{
bookmarkName: "google",
bookmarkUrl: "www.google.com"
},
{
bookmarkName: "yahoo",
bookmarkUrl: "www.yahoo.com"
}
]
},
{
userId: 456,
bookmarks:[
{
bookmarkName: "google",
bookmarkUrl: "www.google.com"
}
]
}
The problem with the second option is that it causes growing documents. Growing documents are bad for write performance, because the database will have to constantly move them around the database files.
To improve write performance, MongoDB always writes each document as a consecutive sequence to the database files with little padding between each document. When a document is changed and the change results in the document growing beyond the current padding, the document needs to be deleted and moved to the end of the current file. This is a quite slow operation.
Also, MongoDB has a hardcoded limit of 16MB per document (mostly to discourage growing documents). In your illustrated use-case this might not be a problem, but I assume that this is just a simplified example and your actual data will have a lot more fields per bookmark entry. When you store a lot of meta-data with each entry, that 16MB limit could become a problem.
So I would recommend you to pick the first option.
I would go with the option 2 - multiple bookmarks within one document per user because this schema would take advantage of MongoDB’s rich documents also known as “denormalized” models.
Embedded data models allow applications to store related pieces of information in the same database record. As a result, applications may need to issue fewer queries and updates to complete common operations. Link
There are two tools that allow applications to represent these
relationships: references and embedded documents.
When designing data models, always consider the application usage of
the data (i.e. queries, updates, and processing of the data) as well
as the inherent structure of the data itself.
The Second type of structure represents an Embedded type.
Generally Embedded type structure should be chosen when our application needs:
a) better performance for read operations.
b) the ability to request and retrieve
related data in a single database operation.
c) Data Consistency, to update related data in a single atomic write operation.
In MongoDB, operations are atomic at the document level. No single
write operation can change more than one document. Operations that
modify more than a single document in a collection still operate on
one document at a time. Ensure that your application stores all fields
with atomic dependency requirements in the same document. If the
application can tolerate non-atomic updates for two pieces of data,
you can store these data in separate documents. A data model that
embeds related data in a single document facilitates these kinds of
atomic operations.
d) to issue fewer queries and updates to complete common operations.
When not to choose:
Embedding related data in documents may lead to situations where
documents grow after creation. Document growth can impact write
performance and lead to data fragmentation. (limit of 16MB per
document)
Now let's compare the structures from a developer's perspective:
Say I want to see all the bookmarks of a particular user:
The first type would require an aggregation to be applied on all the documents.
minimum set of functions that would be required to get the aggregated results, $match,$group(with $push operator):
db.collection.aggregate([{$match:{"userId":123}},{$group:{"_id":"$userId","bookmarkNames":{$push:"$bookmarkName"},"bookMarkUrls:{$push:"$bookmarkUrl"}"}}])
or a find() which returns multiple documents to be iterated.
Wheras the Embedded type would allow us to fetch it using a $match in the find query.
db.collection.find({"userId":123});
This just indicates the added overhead from the developer's point of view. We would view the first type as an unwinded form of the embedded document.
The first type, multiple bookmarks as separate documents in a collection,
is normally used in case of logging. Where the log entries are huge and will have a TTL, time to live. The collections in that case, would be capped collections. Where documents would be automatically deleted after a particular period of time.
Bottomline, if your documents size would not grow beyond 16 MB at any particular time opt for the Embedded type. it would save developing effort as well.
See Also: MongoDB relationships: embed or reference?

MongoDB - How much data is too much data?

I'm building an application that uses MongoDB as a database. I have a lot of products, and I want to log what products a user looks at to the user's database entry. For instance, a user profile looks like this:
{
"email" : "foo#bar.com",
"name" : "John Snow",
"_id" : ObjectId("51ecbcc6896652a008000001"),
"productsViewed" : [
product1,
product2,
product3,
product4
]
}
I have two options here. I can log just the _id of each product, or I could log entire objects representing the product (name, price, ~100 word description, categories, that sort of thing). The difference in object size is 1 line of text per product vs about 30 lines per product.
I realise that this is probably a trivial amount of data to be concerned about, but if a user has 10,000 productsViewed entries, will the ~30x larger difference make any sort of impact? Logging more data is far more useful for my purposes but I'd like to avoid my database calls lagging if the user profile becomes quite large.
Question is: At what point (in character length, I guess?) is too much data to store with one MongoDB record?
16 Meg is the limitation for the entire document. This means that all strings etc have to fit within 16 meg. However, before that there are more limitation on your schema which you, yourself hint at:
but if a user has 10,000 productsViewed entries, will the ~30x larger difference make any sort of impact?
And the answer is yes. First off with the added data of the root user you will probably be over the 16 meg limit, however, further on from this the in-memory $pull, $push and other sub document operators might have a hard time keeping peformance up. You can sort of mitigate that problem by batching your subdocuments into groups of 100.
However, yet again, you have an even bigger problem: Fragmentation. Since MongoDB stores the record in a single contigeous space on the disk, hence it has settings like padding, you could see considerable fragmentation from odd sized record objects not being reused here.
I would personally say that you should factor off this relation to a separate collection.

Mongodb : multiple specific collections or one "store-it-all" collection for performance / indexing

I'm logging different actions users make on our website. Each action can be of different type : a comment, a search query, a page view, a vote etc... Each of these types has its own schema and common infos. For instance :
comment : {"_id":(mongoId), "type":"comment", "date":4/7/2012,
"user":"Franck", "text":"This is a sample comment"}
search : {"_id":(mongoId), "type":"search", "date":4/6/2012,
"user":"Franck", "query":"mongodb"} etc...
Basically, in OOP or RDBMS, I would design an Action class / table and a set of inherited classes / tables (Comment, Search, Vote).
As MongoDb is schema less, I'm inclined to set up a unique collection ("Actions") where I would store these objects instead of multiple collections (collection Actions + collection Comments with a link key to its parent Action etc...).
My question is : what about performance / response time if I try to search by specific columns ?
As I understand indexing best practices, if I want "every users searching for mongodb", I would index columns "type" + "query". But it will not concern the whole set of data, only those of type "search".
Will MongoDb engine scan the whole table or merely focus on data having this specific schema ?
If you create sparse indexes mongo will ignore any rows that don't have the key. Though there is the specific limitation of sparse indexes that they can only index one field.
However, if you are only going to query using common fields there's absolutely no reason not to use a single collection.
I.e. if an index on user+type (or date+user+type) will satisfy all your querying needs - there's no reason to create multiple collections
Tip: use date objects for dates, use object ids not names where appropriate.
Here is some useful information from MongoDB's Best Practices
Store all data for a record in a single document.
MongoDB provides atomic operations at the document level. When data
for a record is stored in a single document the entire record can be
retrieved in a single seek operation, which is very efficient. In some
cases it may not be practical to store all data in a single document,
or it may negatively impact other operations. Make the trade-offs that
are best for your application.
Avoid Large Documents.
The maximum size for documents in MongoDB is 16MB. In practice most
documents are a few kilobytes or less. Consider documents more like
rows in a table than the tables themselves. Rather than maintaining
lists of records in a single document, instead make each record a
document. For large media documents, such as video, consider using
GridFS, a convention implemented by all the drivers that stores the
binary data across many smaller documents.

Mongodb data storage performance - one doc with items in array vs multiple docs per item

I have statistical data in a Mongodb collection saved for each record per day.
For example my collection looks roughly like
{ record_id: 12345, date: Date(2011,12,13), stat_value_1:12345, stat_value_2:98765 }
Each record_id/date combo is unique. I query the collection to get statistics per record for a given date range using map-reduce.
As far as read query performance, is this strategy superior than storing one document per record_id containing an array of statistical data just like the above dict:
{ _id: record_id, stats: [
{ date: Date(2011,12,11), stat_value_1:39884, stat_value_2:98765 },
{ date: Date(2011,12,12), stat_value_1:38555, stat_value_2:4665 },
{ date: Date(2011,12,13), stat_value_1:12345, stat_value_2:265 },
]}
On the pro side I will need one query to get the entire stat history of a record without resorting to the slower map-reduce method, and on the con side I'll have to sum up the stats for a given date range in my application code and if a record outgrows is current padding size-wise there's some disc reallocation that will go on.
I think this depends on the usage scenario. If the data set for a single aggregation is small like those 700 records and you want to do this in real-time, I think it's best to choose yet another option and query all individual records and aggregate them client-side. This avoids the Map/Reduce overhead, it's easier to maintain and it does not suffer from reallocation or size limits. Index use should be efficient and connection-wise, I doubt there's much of a difference: most drivers batch transfers anyway.
The added flexibility might come in handy, for instance if you want to know the stat value for a single day across all records (if that ever makes sense for your application). Should you ever need to store more stat_values, your maximum number of dates per records would go down in the subdocument approach. It's also generally easier to work with db documents rather than subdocuments.
Map/Reduce really shines if you're aggregating huge amounts of data across multiple servers, where otherwise bandwidth and client concurrency would be bottlenecks.
I think you can reference to here, and also see foursquare how to solve this kind of problem here . They are both valuable.