Using GridFS - Should it be on a separate DB? - mongodb

I am making a site that has a lot of audio storage, terabytes, and I was wanting to use GridFS for sharding and to be able to easily expand the database across multiple machines.
My question is that would it be better to put the files in a separate mongo database? There will be a good amount of documents in the mongodb, I just was not sure what happens when you start sharding with the GridFS portion.
Thanks!

Even if you keep the GridFS storage in the same database as your other collections, you can still choose which collections to shard (or not) when you need to move to sharding. That said, if you have it in a separate database, you will be able to more easily move it to a separate cluster if you so choose -- so you could, for instance, have a 3 shard cluster for your "main" collections and a 5 shard cluster for GridFS (or any other configuration you choose).
As far as sharding GridFS collections, please see the MongoDB docs on choosing a shard key for GridFS. Commonly, people shard the chunks collection (which is where the file data itself is stored) on files_id so that all chunks for the same file reside on the same shard. Again, please see the documentation page for more detail.

Related

GridFS with location-based sharding

Is there any way to shard the gridFS files and chunks based on a location information ?
I want to setup a mongo configuration with sharding and replication for handling multi-sites and guaranteeing that the data produced on one site remains accessible even if the sites are isolated.
I followed the following documentation from mongo and it works just perfectly for the standard collections but not for GridFS.
https://docs.mongodb.com/v3.2/tutorial/sharding-segmenting-data-by-location/
All I found for GridFS was _id based or file_id based sharding.
By now the only solution I have would be to use different GridFS prefixes which means different collections and to shard them each on a given site.
I'm using :
mogodb 3.2
Java driver
Python driver
Thanks for any advice.
I found an answer on StackExchange :
How to define shardKey on GridFS collections to achieve Location/Data Centre affinity (MongoDB)
Given that the only possibility is to shard the chunks on the ID, the idea is to use MongoGridFSCreateOptions to force a location-based ID to the chunks.

Is it good to add sharding on single server?

is it good to do sharding on single machine/server, if size of mongodb documents is above 10GB, will it perform well?
The key rule of sharding is don't shard until you absolutely have to. If you're not having problems with performance now don't need to shard. Choosing sharding keys can be a difficult process to make your data gets balanced correctly between shards. Sharding the database can add severe overhead to your deployment that can take a lot to manage since you will need additional mongod process, config servers, and replica sets in order for it to be stable for production.
I'm assuming you mean your collections are 10GB. Depending on the size of your machine a 10GB collection is not a lot for mongo to handle. IF you're having performance issue with queries my first step would be to go through your mongo log and see if there are any queries you can add indexes for.

MongoDB: BIllions of documents in a collection

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.

MongoDB Cluster and 100,000 Capped Collections

How does a MongoDB cluster distribute Capped Collections across nodes for balancing load? I am planning to use a Capped Collection for comments of each Post in a MongoDB based CMS. Lets assume we have 100,000 Posts and hence 100,000 Capped Collections storing comments for each post. Will these Capped Collections be distributed evenly across cluster for read and write scalability?
I dont want to shard a capped collection. I want to distribute all the capped collections evenly across the cluster for read and write scalability.
Lets assume we have 5 machines. When we create new collections, I need them to be created on different machines/nodes and also redistribute them when new machines are added.
1) When creating a collection (capped or not) it is set on the primary shard of the database. The solution would be to set a collection per database so that mongo equilibrate the databases across ythe cluster. The rule for equilibrium is not clear but depends mainly on the current load on each shard.
2) Believe me, you should use one big collection for all your post and shard it in a clever way. It will ensure really efficient and automatic balance of your data across your cluster.
More over capped collection are not really space efficient because it will pre-allocate all the space for all your collections (meaning that you'll have a lot of wasted space for nothing)
Unless you have a very good reason to go for capping, you have better try sharding.
One advice : use the 'postId' field in your shard key, it will probably the most performance.
Apparently it is not implemented yet for mongodb: Issue
Quote from similar question:
But you can create multiple capped collections on different shards to
increase write throughput; however, you must then run multiple queries
to access all your data.

Sharding GridFS on MongoDB

I'm documenting about the GridFS and the possibility to shard it among different machines.
Reading the documentation here, the suggested shard key is chunks.files_id. This key will be linked to the _id of the files collection, thus this _id is incremental. Every new file i save in the Grid will have a new incremental _id.
In the O'Reilly "Scaling MongoDB" book the use of an incremental shard key is discouraged to avoid HotSpots (the last shard will receive all the write and read).
what is your suggestion for sharding the GridFS collection?
have anybody experienced the HotSpot problem?
thank you.
You should shard on files_id to keep file chunks together, but you are correct that that will create a hotspot. If you can, use something other than ObjectId for _ids in the fs.files collection (probably MD5s would be better than ObjectIds).
We'll be adding hashing for sharding, which will solve this, but not until at least 2.0.
You can shard gridfs data because gridfs it just two collecttions: chunks and files. And gridfs sharding it's very useful and great thing. About gridfs shard key it's always bad choose random or incremental shard key, because data not evenly distribute across shards. In case of incremental shard key all writes going to the last shard and it growth and once difference between become 10 or more chunks, balancer move data to another shards. Moving data to another shard always difficult task that should be avoided as it possible.
So when you choose shard key you should care about even distribution of data.
Also if you get luck mb author of 'Scaling MongoDB' kristina(great specialist in shard keys) will answer to your question.
Documentation says that in common cases you should choose default index fileId:1,n:1 as shard key:
There are different ways that GridFS
can be sharded, depending on the need.
One common way to shard, based on
pre-existing indexes, is:
"files" collection is not sharded. All
file records will live in 1 shard. It
is highly recommended to make that
shard very resilient (at least 3 node
replica set) "chunks" collection gets
sharded using the existing index
"files_id: 1, n: 1". Some files at the
end of ranges may have their chunks
split across shards, but most files
will be fully contained within the
same shard.
Currently MongoDB as of version 1.8.1 supports only sharding on "file_id" field, because of using md5 to verify the upload, but it doesn't
work across shards yet. So you cannot split single file across shards.
Answer on google group7