MongoDB is a cross-platform, document-oriented database that provides, high performance, high availability, and easy scalability. MongoDB works on the concept of collection and document.
Database
The database is a physical container for collections. Each database gets its own set of files on the file system. A single MongoDB server typically has multiple databases.
Collection
A collection is a group of MongoDB documents. It is the equivalent of an RDBMS table. A collection exists within a single database. Collections do not enforce a schema. Documents within a collection can have different fields. Typically, all documents in a collection are of similar or related purposes.
Document
A document is a set of key-value pairs. Documents have a dynamic schema. Dynamic schema means that documents in the same collection do not need to have the same set of fields or structure, and common fields in a collection's documents may hold different types of data.
The following table shows the relationship of RDBMS terminology with MongoDB.
| RDBMS | MongoDB |
|---|---|
| Database | Database |
| Table | Collection |
| Tuple/Row | Document |
| column | Field |
| Table Join | Embedded Documents |
| Primary Key | Primary Key (Default key _id provided by MongoDB itself) |
| Database Server and Client | |
| mysqld/Oracle | mongod |
| mysql/sqlplus | mongo |
Sample Document
The following example shows the document structure of a blog site, which is simply a comma-separated key-value pair.
{ _id: ObjectId(7df78ad8902c) title: 'MongoDB Overview', description: 'MongoDB is no sql database', by: 'tutorials point', url: 'http://www.tutorialspoint.com', tags: ['mongodb', 'database', 'NoSQL'], likes: 100, comments: [ { user:'user1', message: 'My first comment', dateCreated: new Date(2011,1,20,2,15), like: 0 }, { user:'user2', message: 'My second comments', dateCreated: new Date(2011,1,25,7,45), like: 5 } ] }
_id is a 12 bytes hexadecimal number which assures the uniqueness of every document. You can provide _id while inserting the document. If you don’t provide then MongoDB provides a unique id for every document. These 12 bytes first 4 bytes for the current timestamp, next 3 bytes for machine id, next 2 bytes for process id of MongoDB server, and remaining 3 bytes are simple incremental VALUE
