A MongoDB White Paper

MongoDB Architecture Guide

MongoDB 3.4
November 2016

Table of Contents
Introduction

How we Build & Run Modern Apps

The Nexus Architecture

MongoDB Multimodel Architecture

MongoDB Data Model

MongoDB Query Model

MongoDB Data Management

Consistency & Durability

Availability

10

Performance & Compression

12

Security

12

Operational Management

13

MongoDB Atlas

15

Conclusion

15

We Can Help

16

Resources

16

Introduction
MongoDB wasnt designed in a lab. We built MongoDB
from our own experiences building large-scale, high
availability, robust systems. We didnt start from scratch, we
really tried to figure out what was broken, and tackle that.
So the way I think about MongoDB is that if you take
MySQL, and change the data model from relational to
document-based, you get a lot of great features:
embedded docs for speed, manageability, agile
development with dynamic schemas, easier horizontal
scalability because joins arent as important. There are a lot
of things that work great in relational databases: indexes,
dynamic queries and updates to name a few, and we
havent changed much there. For example, the way you
design your indexes in MongoDB should be exactly the
way you do it in MySQL or Oracle, you just have the option
of indexing an embedded field.
Eliot Horowitz, MongoDB CTO and Co-Founder
MongoDB is designed for how we build and run
data-driven applications with modern development
techniques, programming models, computing resources,
and operational automation.

How We Build & Run Modern

Applications
Relational databases have a long-standing position in most
organizations, and for good reason. Relational databases
underpin existing applications that meet current business
needs; they are supported by an extensive ecosystem of
tools; and there is a large pool of labor qualified to
implement and maintain these systems.
But organizations are increasingly considering alternatives
to legacy relational infrastructure, driven by challenges
presented in building modern applications:
Developers are working with applications that create
massive volumes of new, rapidly changing data types
structured, semi-structured, unstructured and
polymorphic data.
Long gone is the twelve-to-eighteen month waterfall
development cycle. Now small teams work in agile
sprints, iterating quickly and pushing code every week
or two, some even multiple times every day.
1

 Applications that once served a finite audience are now

delivered as services that must be always-on, accessible
from many different devices on any channel, and scaled
globally to millions of users.
Organizations are now turning to scale-out architectures
using open source software, commodity servers and
cloud computing instead of large monolithic servers and
storage infrastructure.

The Nexus Architecture

MongoDBs design philosophy is focused on combining the
critical capabilities of relational databases with the
innovations of NoSQL technologies. Our vision is to
leverage the work that Oracle and others have done over
the last 40 years to make relational databases what they
are today. Rather than discard decades of proven database
maturity, MongoDB is picking up where they left off by
combining key relational database capabilities with the
work that Internet pioneers have done to address the
requirements of modern applications.

Figur
Figure
e 1: MongoDB Nexus Architecture, blending the best
of relational and NoSQL technologies
Relational databases have reliably served applications for
many years, and offer features that remain critical today as
developers build the next generation of applications:
Expr
Expressive
essive query language & secondary Indexes
Indexes.
Users should be able to access and manipulate their
data in sophisticated ways to support both operational
and analytical applications. Indexes play a critical role in
providing efficient access to data, supported natively by
the database rather than maintained in application code.

Str
Strong
ong consistency
consistency.. Applications should be able to
immediately read what has been written to the
database. It is much more complex to build applications
around an eventually consistent model, imposing
significant work on the developer, even for the most
sophisticated engineering teams.
Enterprise Management and Integrations.
Databases are just one piece of application
infrastructure, and need to fit seamlessly into the
enterprise IT stack. Organizations need a database that
can be secured, monitored, automated, and integrated
with their existing technology infrastructure, processes,
and staff, including operations teams, DBAs, and data
engineers.
However, modern applications impose requirements not
addressed by relational databases, and this has driven the
development of NoSQL databases which offer:
Flexible Dat
Data
a Model. NoSQL databases emerged to
address the requirements for the data we see
dominating modern applications. Whether document,
graph, key-value, or wide-column, all of them offer a
flexible data model, making it easy to store and combine
data of any structure and allow dynamic modification of
the schema without downtime or performance impact.
Sc
Scalability
alability and P
Performance.
erformance. NoSQL databases were
all built with a focus on scalability, so they all include
some form of sharding or partitioning. This allows the
database to be scaled out across commodity hardware
deployed on-premises or in the cloud, enabling almost
unlimited growth with higher throughput and lower
latency than relational databases.
AlwaysAlways-On
On Global Deployments. NoSQL databases
are designed for continuously available systems that
provide a consistent, high quality experience for users
all over the world. They are designed to run across many
nodes, including replication to automatically synchronize
data across servers, racks, and
geographically-dispersed data centers.
While offering these innovations, NoSQL systems have
sacrificed the critical capabilities that people have come to
expect and rely upon from relational databases. MongoDB
offers a different approach. With its Nexus Architecture,
MongoDB is the only database that harnesses the

Figur
Figure
e 2: Flexible Storage Architecture, optimising MongoDB for unique application demands
innovations of NoSQL while maintaining the foundation of
relational databases.

MongoDB Multimodel
Architecture
MongoDB embraces two key trends in modern IT:
Organizations are rapidly expanding the range of
applications they deliver to digitally transform the
business.
CIOs are rationalizing their technology portfolios to a
strategic set of vendors they can leverage to more
efficiently support their business.
With MongoDB, organizations can address diverse
application needs, hardware resources, and deployment
designs with a single database technology:
MongoDBs flexible document data model presents a
superset of other database models. It allows data be
represented as simple key-value pairs and flat, table-like
structures, through to rich documents and objects with
deeply nested arrays and sub-documents
With an expressive query language, documents can be
queried in many ways from simple lookups to creating
sophisticated processing pipelines for data analytics

and transformations, through to faceted search, JOINs

and graph traversals.
With a flexible storage architecture, application owners
can deploy storage engines optimized for different
workload and operational requirements.
MongoDBs multimodel design significantly reduces
developer and operational complexity when compared to
running multiple distinct database technologies to meet
different applications needs. Users can leverage the same
MongoDB query language, data model, scaling, security,
and operational tooling across different parts of their
application, with each powered by the optimal storage
engine.

Flexible Storage Architecture

MongoDB uniquely allows users to mix and match multiple
storage engines within a single deployment. This flexibility
provides a more simple and reliable approach to meeting
diverse application needs for data. Traditionally, multiple
database technologies would need to be managed to meet
these needs, with complex, custom integration code to
move data between the technologies, and to ensure
consistent, secure access. With MongoDBs flexible
storage architecture, the database automatically manages
the movement of data between storage engine
technologies using native replication.
3

MongoDB 3.4 ships with four supported storage engines,

all of which can coexist within a single MongoDB replica
set. This makes it easy to evaluate and migrate between
them, and to optimize for specific application requirements
for example combining the in-memory engine for ultra
low-latency operations with a disk-based engine for
persistence. The supported storage engines include:
The default WiredTiger storage engine. For many
applications, WiredTiger's granular concurrency control
and native compression will provide the best all round
performance and storage efficiency for the broadest
range of applications.
The Encrypted storage engine protecting highly
sensitive data, without the performance or management
overhead of separate filesystem encryption. (Requires
MongoDB Enterprise Advanced).
The In-Memory storage engine delivering the extreme
performance coupled with real time analytics for the
most demanding, latency-sensitive applications.
(Requires MongoDB Enterprise Advanced).
The MMAPv1 engine, an improved version of the
storage engine used in pre-3.x MongoDB releases.

MongoDB Data Model

Data As Documents
MongoDB stores data in a binary representation called
BSON (Binary JSON). The BSON encoding extends the
popular JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) representation
to include additional types such as int, long, date, floating
point, and decimal128. BSON documents contain one or
more fields, and each field contains a value of a specific
data type, including arrays, binary data and sub-documents.

Figur
Figure
e 3: Example relational data model for a blogging
application
Documents that tend to share a similar structure are
organized as collections. It may be helpful to think of
collections as being analogous to a table in a relational
database: documents are similar to rows, and fields are
similar to columns.
For example, consider the data model for a blogging
application. In a relational database the data model would
comprise multiple tables. To simplify the example, assume
there are tables for Categories, Tags, Users, Comments
and Articles.
In MongoDB the data could be modeled as two collections,
one for users, and the other for articles. In each blog
document there might be multiple comments, multiple tags,
and multiple categories, each expressed as an embedded
array.

Dynamic Schema without Compromising

Data Governance
MongoDB documents can vary in structure. For example,
all documents that describe users might contain the user id
and the last date they logged into the system, but only
some of these documents might contain the users identity
for one or more third party applications. Fields can vary
from document to document; there is no need to declare
the structure of documents to the system documents are
self describing. If a new field needs to be added to a
document then the field can be created without affecting
all other documents in the system, without updating a
central system catalog, and without taking the system
offline.
Developers can start writing code and persist the objects
as they are created. And when developers add more
features, MongoDB continues to store the updated objects
without the need to perform costly ALTER TABLE
operations, or worse having to re-design the schema
from scratch.
Figur
Figure
e 4: Data as documents: simpler for developers,
faster for users.
As this example illustrates, MongoDB documents tend to
have all data for a given record in a single document,
whereas in a relational database information for a given
record is usually spread across many tables. With the
MongoDB document model, data is more localized, which
significantly reduces the need to JOIN separate tables.
The result is dramatically higher performance and
scalability across commodity hardware as a single read to
the database can retrieve the entire document containing
all related data. Unlike many NoSQL databases, users dont
need to give up JOINs entirely. For additional flexibility,
MongoDB provides the ability to perform left-outer JOINs
that combine data from multiple collections.
MongoDB BSON documents are closely aligned to the
structure of objects in the programming language. This
makes it simpler and faster for developers to model how
data in the application will map to data stored in the
database.

Document Validation
Dynamic schemas bring great agility, but it is also important
that controls can be implemented to maintain data quality,
especially if the database is shared by multiple
applications. Unlike NoSQL databases that push
enforcement of these controls back into application code,
MongoDB provides document validation within the
database. Users can enforce checks on document
structure, data types, data ranges and the presence of
mandatory fields. As a result, DBAs can apply data
governance standards, while developers maintain the
benefits of a flexible document model.

Schema Design
Although MongoDB provides schema flexibility, schema
design is still important. Developers and DBAs should
consider a number of topics, including the types of queries
the application will need to perform, relationships between
data, how objects are managed in the application code, and
how documents will change over time. Schema design is an
extensive topic that is beyond the scope of this document.

For more information, please see Data Modeling

Considerations.

MongoDB Query Model

subscriptions used with your self-managed instances, or

hosted MongoDB Atlas instances. MongoDB Compass is
free to use for evaluation and in development
environments.

Idiomatic Drivers
MongoDB provides native drivers for all popular
programming languages and frameworks to make
development natural. Supported drivers include Java,
Javascript, .NET, Python, Perl, PHP, Scala and others, in
addition to 30+ community-developed drivers. MongoDB
drivers are designed to be idiomatic for the given language.
One fundamental difference with relational databases is
that the MongoDB query model is implemented as
methods or functions within the API of a specific
programming language, as opposed to a completely
separate language like SQL. This, coupled with the affinity
between MongoDBs JSON document model and the data
structures used in object-oriented programming, makes
integration with applications simple. For a complete list of
drivers see the MongoDB Drivers page.

Interacting with the Database

MongoDB offers developers and administrators a range of
tools for interacting with the database, independent of the
drivers.
The mongo shell is a rich, interactive JavaScript shell that is
included with all MongoDB distributions. Additionally
MongoDB Compass is a sophisticated and intuitive GUI for
MongoDB. Offering rich schema exploration and
management, Compass allows DBAs to modify documents,
create validation rules, and efficiently optimize query
performance by visualizing explain plans and index usage.
Sophisticated queries can be built and executed by simply
selecting document elements from the user interface, with
the results viewed both graphically, and as a set of JSON
documents. All of these tasks can be accomplished from a
point and click interface, and all with zero knowledge of
MongoDB's query language.
MongoDB Compass is included with both MongoDB
Professional and MongoDB Enterprise Advanced

Figur
Figure
e 5: Interactively build and execute database queries
with MongoDB Compass

Querying and Visualizing Data

Unlike NoSQL databases, MongoDB is not limited to
simple Key-Value operations. Developers can build rich
applications using complex queries, aggregations and
secondary indexes that unlock the value in structured,
semi-structured and unstructured data.
A key element of this flexibility is MongoDB's support for
many types of queries. A query may return a document, a
subset of specific fields within the document or complex
aggregations and transformation of many documents:
Key-value queries return results based on any field in
the document, often the primary key.
Range queries return results based on values defined
as inequalities (e.g, greater than, less than or equal to,
between).
Geospatial queries return results based on proximity
criteria, intersection and inclusion as specified by a
point, line, circle or polygon.
Sear
Searcch queries return results in relevance order and in
faceted groups, based on text arguments using Boolean
operators (e.g., AND, OR, NOT), and through bucketing,
grouping and counting of query results. With support for
collations, data comparison and sorting order can be
defined for over 100 different languages and locales.

 Aggr
Aggregation
egation F
Framework
ramework queries return aggregations
and transformations of values returned by the query
(e.g., count, min, max, average, similar to a SQL GROUP
BY statement).
JOI
JOINs
Ns and graph traversals. Through the $lookup
stage of the aggregation pipeline, documents from
separate collections can be combined through a left
outer JOIN operation. $graphLookup brings native
graph processing within MongoDB, enabling efficient
traversals across trees, graphs and hierarchical data to
uncover patterns and surface previously unidentified
connections.
MapReduce queries execute complex data processing
that is expressed in JavaScript and executed across
data in the database.
Additionally the MongoDB Connector for Apache Spark
exposes Sparks Scala, Java, Python, and R libraries.
MongoDB data is materialized as DataFrames and
Datasets for analysis through machine learning, graph,
streaming, and SQL APIs.

Data Visualization with BI Tools

MongoDB includes support for many types of secondary

indexes that can be declared on any field in the document,
including fields within arrays:
Unique Indexes
Indexes. By specifying an index as unique,
MongoDB will reject inserts of new documents or the
update of a document with an existing value for the field
for which the unique index has been created. By default
all indexes are not set as unique. If a compound index is
specified as unique, the combination of values must be
unique.
Compound Indexes. It can be useful to create
compound indexes for queries that specify multiple
predicates For example, consider an application that
stores data about customers. The application may need
to find customers based on last name, first name, and
city of residence. With a compound index on last name,
first name, and city of residence, queries could
efficiently locate people with all three of these values
specified. An additional benefit of a compound index is
that any leading field within the index can be used, so
fewer indexes on single fields may be necessary: this
compound index would also optimize queries looking for
customers by last name.

With the MongoDB Connector for BI included in MongoDB

Enterprise Advanced, modern application data can be
easily analyzed with industry-standard SQL-based BI and
analytics platforms. Business analysts and data scientists
can seamlessly analyze semi and unstructured data
managed in MongoDB, alongside traditional data in their
SQL databases using the same BI tools deployed within
millions of enterprises.

Array Indexes. For fields that contain an array, each

array value is stored as a separate index entry. For
example, documents that describe products might
include a field for components. If there is an index on
the component field, each component is indexed and
queries on the component field can be optimized by this
index. There is no special syntax required for creating
array indexes if the field contains an array, it will be
indexed as a array index.

Indexing

TTL Indexes. In some cases data should expire out of

the system automatically. Time to Live (TTL) indexes
allow the user to specify a period of time after which the
data will automatically be deleted from the database. A
common use of TTL indexes is applications that
maintain a rolling window of history (e.g., most recent
100 days) for user actions such as clickstreams.

Indexes are a crucial mechanism for optimizing system

performance and scalability while providing flexible access
to the data. Like most database management systems,
while indexes will improve the performance of some
operations by orders of magnitude, they incur associated
overhead in write operations, disk usage, and memory
consumption. By default, the WiredTiger storage engine
compresses indexes in RAM, freeing up more of the
working set for documents.

Geospatial Indexes. MongoDB provides geospatial

indexes to optimize queries related to location within a
two dimensional space, such as projection systems for
the earth. These indexes allow MongoDB to optimize
queries for documents that contain points or a polygon

that are closest to a given point or line; that are within a

circle, rectangle, or polygon; or that intersect with a
circle, rectangle, or polygon.
Partial Indexes. By specifying a filtering expression
during index creation, a user can instruct MongoDB to
include only documents that meet the desired
conditions, for example by only indexing active
customers. Partial indexes balance delivering low
latency query performance while reducing system
overhead.
Sparse Indexes. Sparse indexes only contain entries
for documents that contain the specified field. Because
the document data model of MongoDB allows for
flexibility in the data model from document to document,
it is common for some fields to be present only in a
subset of all documents. Sparse indexes allow for
smaller, more efficient indexes when fields are not
present in all documents.
Text Sear
Searcch Indexes. MongoDB provides a specialized
index for text search that uses advanced,
language-specific linguistic rules for stemming,
tokenization, case sensitivity and stop words. Queries
that use the text search index will return documents in
relevance order. One or more fields can be included in
the text index.

Query Optimization
MongoDB automatically optimizes queries to make
evaluation as efficient as possible. Evaluation normally
includes selecting data based on predicates, and sorting
data based on the sort criteria provided. The query
optimizer selects the best index to use by periodically
running alternate query plans and selecting the index with
the best response time for each query type. The results of
this empirical test are stored as a cached query plan and
are updated periodically. Developers can review and
optimize plans using the powerful explain method and
index filters. Using MongoDB Compass, DBAs can
visualize index coverage, enabling them to determine which
specific fields are indexed, their type, size, and how often
they are used. Compass also provides the ability to
visualize explain plans, presenting key information on how
a query performed for example the number of documents
returned, execution time, index usage, and more. Each

stage of the execution pipeline is represented as a node in

a tree, making it simple to view explain plans from queries
distributed across multiple nodes.
Index intersection provides additional flexibility by enabling
MongoDB to use more than one index to optimize an
ad-hoc query at run-time.

Covered Queries
Queries that return results containing only indexed fields
are called covered queries. These results can be returned
without reading from the source documents. With the
appropriate indexes, workloads can be optimized to use
predominantly covered queries.

MongoDB Data Management

Auto-Sharding
MongoDB provides horizontal scale-out for databases on
low cost, commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure using
a technique called sharding, which is transparent to
applications. Sharding distributes data across multiple
physical partitions called shards. Sharding allows
MongoDB deployments to address the hardware
limitations of a single server, such as bottlenecks in RAM
or disk I/O, without adding complexity to the application.
MongoDB automatically balances the data in the sharded
cluster as the data grows or the size of the cluster
increases or decreases.
Unlike relational databases, sharding is automatic and built
into the database. Developers don't face the complexity of
building sharding logic into their application code, which
then needs to be updated as shards are migrated.
Operations teams don't need to deploy additional
clustering software or expensive shared-disk infrastructure
to manage process and data distribution or failure recovery.

Figur
Figure
e 6: Automatic sharding provides horizontal scalability
in MongoDB.

Unlike other distributed databases, multiple sharding

policies are available that enable developers and
administrators to distribute data across a cluster according
to query patterns or data locality. As a result, MongoDB
delivers much higher scalability across a diverse set of
workloads:

query to all shards, aggregating and sorting the results as

appropriate. Multiple query routers can be used with a
MongoDB system, and the appropriate number is
determined based on performance and availability
requirements of the application.

Range Shar
Sharding.
ding. Documents are partitioned across
shards according to the shard key value. Documents
with shard key values close to one another are likely to
be co-located on the same shard. This approach is well
suited for applications that need to optimize range
based queries.
Hash Shar
Sharding.
ding. Documents are distributed according
to an MD5 hash of the shard key value. This approach
guarantees a uniform distribution of writes across
shards, but is less optimal for range-based queries.
Zone Shar
Sharding.
ding. Provides the the ability for DBAs and
operations teams to define specific rules governing data
placement in a sharded cluster. Zones accommodate a
range of deployment scenarios for example locating
data by geographic region, by hardware configuration
for tiered storage architectures, or by application
feature. Administrators can continuously refine data
placement rules by modifying shard key ranges, and
MongoDB will automatically migrate the data to its new
zone.
Tens of thousands of organizations use MongoDB to build
high-performance systems at scale. You can read more
about them on the MongoDB scaling page.

Query Router
Sharding is transparent to applications; whether there is
one or one hundred shards, the application code for
querying MongoDB is the same. Applications issue queries
to a query router that dispatches the query to the
appropriate shards.
For key-value queries that are based on the shard key, the
query router will dispatch the query to the shard that
manages the document with the requested key. When
using range-based sharding, queries that specify ranges on
the shard key are only dispatched to shards that contain
documents with values within the range. For queries that
dont use the shard key, the query router will broadcast the

Figur
Figure
e 7: Sharding is transparent to applications.

Consistency
Transaction Model & Configurable Write
Availability
MongoDB is ACID compliant at the document level. One or
more fields may be written in a single operation, including
updates to multiple sub-documents and elements of an
array. The ACID guarantees provided by MongoDB ensures
complete isolation as a document is updated; any errors
cause the operation to roll back and clients receive a
consistent view of the document.
MongoDB also allows users to specify write availability in
the system using an option called the write concern. The
default write concern acknowledges writes from the
application, allowing the client to catch network exceptions
and duplicate key errors. Developers can use MongoDB's
Write Concerns to configure operations to commit to the
application only after specific policies have been fulfilled
for example only after the operation has been flushed to
the journal on disk. This is the same mode used by many
traditional relational databases to provide durability
guarantees. As a distributed system, MongoDB presents
additional flexibility in enabling users to achieve their
desired durability goals, such as writing to at least two
replicas in one data center and one replica in a second
data center. Each query can specify the appropriate write
concern, ranging from unacknowledged to
9

acknowledgement that writes have been committed to all

replicas.

Availability
Replication
MongoDB maintains multiple copies of data called replica
sets using native replication. A replica set is a fully
self-healing shard that helps prevent database downtime
and can be used to scale read operations. Replica failover
is fully automated, eliminating the need for administrators
to intervene manually.
A replica set consists of multiple replicas. At any given time
one member acts as the primary replica set member and
the other members act as secondary replica set members.
MongoDB is strongly consistent by default: reads and
writes are issued to a primary copy of the data. If the
primary member fails for any reason (e.g., hardware failure,
network partition) one of the secondary members is
automatically elected to primary, typically within several
seconds. As discussed below, sophisticated rules govern
which secondary replicas are evaluated for promotion to
the primary member.

Figur
Figure
e 8: Self-Healing MongoDB Replica Sets for High
Availability
The number of replicas in a MongoDB replica set is
configurable: a larger number of replicas provides
increased data durability and protection against database
downtime (e.g., in case of multiple machine failures, rack
failures, data center failures, or network partitions). Up to
50 members can be provisioned per replica set.
Enabling tunable consistency, applications can optionally
read from secondary replicas, where data is eventually
consistent by default. Reads from secondaries can be
useful in scenarios where it is acceptable for data to be
slightly out of date, such as some reporting and analytical
applications. Administrators can control which secondary
members service a query, based on a consistency window
defined in the driver. For data-center aware reads,
applications can also read from the closest copy of the
data as measured by ping distance to reduce the effects of
geographic latency . For more on reading from secondaries
see the entry on Read Preference.
Replica sets also provide operational flexibility by providing
a way to upgrade hardware and software without requiring

10

the database to be taken offline. This is an important

feature as these types of operations can account for as
much as one third of all downtime in traditional systems.

Replica Set Oplog

Operations that modify a database on the primary replica
set member are replicated to the secondary members
using the oplog (operations log). The oplog contains an
ordered set of idempotent operations that are replayed on
the secondaries. The size of the oplog is configurable and
by default is 5% of the available free disk space. For most
applications, this size represents many hours of operations
and defines the recovery window for a secondary, should
this replica go offline for some period of time and need to
catch up to the primary when it recovers.
If a secondary replica set member is down for a period
longer than is maintained by the oplog, it must be
recovered from the primary replica using a process called
initial synchronization. During this process all databases
with their collections and indexes are copied from the
primary or another replica to the secondary. Initial
synchronization is also performed when adding a new
member to a replica set, or migrating between MongoDB
storage engines. For more information see the page on
Replica Set Data Synchronization.

Elections And Failover

Replica sets reduce operational overhead and improve
system availability. If the primary replica for a shard fails,
secondary replicas together determine which replica
should be elected as the new primary using an extended
implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm. Once the
election process has determined the new primary, the
secondary members automatically start replicating from it.
If the original primary comes back online, it will recognize
its change in state and automatically assume the role of a
secondary.

Election Priority
Sophisticated algorithms control the replica set election
process, ensuring only the most suitable secondary
member is promoted to primary, and reducing the risk of

unnecessary failovers (also known as "false positives"). In a

typical deployment, a new primary replica set member is
promoted within several seconds of the original primary
failing. During this time, queries configured with the
appropriate read preference can continue to be serviced by
secondary replica set members. The election algorithms
evaluate a range of parameters including analysis of
election identifiers and timestamps to identify those replica
set members that have applied the most recent updates
from the primary; heartbeat and connectivity status; and
user-defined priorities assigned to replica set members. In
an election, the replica set elects an eligible member with
the highest priority value as primary. By default, all
members have a priority of 1 and have an equal chance of
becoming primary; however, it is possible to set priority
values that affect the likelihood of a replica becoming
primary.
In some deployments, there may be operational
requirements that can be addressed with election priorities.
For instance, all replicas located in a secondary data center
could be configured with a priority so that one of them
would only become primary if the main data center fails.

Performance & Compression

In-Memory Performance With On-Disk
Capacity
With the In-Memory storage engine, MongoDB users can
realize the performance advantages of in-memory
computing for operational and real-time analytics
workloads. The In-Memory storage engine delivers the
extreme throughput and predictable latency demanded by
the most performance-intensive applications in AdTech,
finance, telecoms, IoT, eCommerce and more, eliminating
the need for separate caching layers.
MongoDB replica sets allow for hybrid in-memory and
on-disk database deployments. Data managed by the
In-Memory engine can be processed and analyzed in real
time, before being automatically replicated to MongoDB
instances configured with the persistent disk-based
WiredTiger storage engine. Lengthy ETL cycles typical
when moving data between different databases is avoided,

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and users no longer have to trade away the scalable

capacity or durability guarantees offered by disk storage.

Storage & Network Efficiency with

Compression
The WiredTiger and Encrypted storage engines support
native compression, reducing physical storage footprint by
as much as 80%. In addition to reduced storage space,
compression enables much higher storage I/O scalability
as fewer bits are read from disk.
Administrators have the flexibility to configure specific
compression algorithms for collections, indexes and the
journal, choosing between:
Snappy (the default library for documents and the
journal), provides the optimum balance between high
document compression ratio typically around 70%,
dependent on data types with low CPU overhead.
zlib, providing higher document compression ratios for
storage-intensive applications at the expense of extra
CPU overhead.
Prefix compression for indexes reducing the in-memory
footprint of index storage by around 50%, freeing up
more of the working set in RAM for frequently accessed
documents. As with snappy, the actual compression
ratio will be dependent on workload.
Administrators can modify the default compression
settings for all collections and indexes. Compression is also
configurable on a per-collection and per-index basis during
collection and index creation.
As a distributed database, MongoDB relies on efficient
network transport during query routing and inter-node
replication. In addition to storage, MongoDB also offers
intra-cluster network compression. Based on the snappy
compression algorithm, network traffic can be compressed
by up to 70%, providing major performance benefits in
bandwidth-constrained environments, and reducing
networking costs.

Security
The frequency and severity of data breaches continues to
escalate. Industry analysts predict cybercrime will cost the
global economy $6 trillion annually by 2021. Organizations
face an onslaught of new threat classes and threat actors
with phishing, ransomware and intellectual property theft
growing more than 50% year on year, and key
infrastructure subject to increased disruption. With
databases storing an organizations most important
information assets, securing them is top of mind for
administrators.
MongoDB Enterprise Advanced features extensive
capabilities to defend, detect, and control access to data:
Authentic
Authentication.
ation. Simplifying access control to the
database, MongoDB offers integration with external
security mechanisms including LDAP, Windows Active
Directory, Kerberos, and x.509 certificates.
Authorization. User-defined roles enable
administrators to configure granular permissions for a
user or an application based on the privileges they need
to do their job. These can be defined in MongoDB, or
centrally within an LDAP server. Additionally,
administrators can define views that expose only a
subset of data from an underlying collection, i.e. a view
that filters or masks specific fields, such as Personally
Identifiable Information (PII) from customer data or
health records.
Auditing. For regulatory compliance, security
administrators can use MongoDB's native audit log to
track any operation taken against the database
whether DML, DCL or DDL.
Encryption. MongoDB data can be encrypted on the
network, on disk and in backups. With the Encrypted
storage engine, protection of data at-rest is an integral
feature within the database. By natively encrypting
database files on disk, administrators eliminate both the
management and performance overhead of external
encryption mechanisms. Only those staff who have the
appropriate database authorization credentials can
access the encrypted data, providing additional levels of
defence.

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To learn more, download the MongoDB Security Reference

Architecture Whitepaper.

administrators have traditionally performed manually

deploying a new cluster, upgrades, creating point in time
backups, and many other operational activities.

Managing MongoDB Provisioning, Monitoring and

Disaster Recovery

Ops Manager is designed to adapt to problems as they

arise by continuously assessing state and making
adjustments as needed. Using a sophisticated rules engine,
agents adjust their individual plans as conditions change. In
the face of many failure scenarios such as server failures
and network partitions agents will revise their plans to
reach a safe state.

Created by the engineers who develop the database,

MongoDB Ops Manager is the simplest way to run
MongoDB in your own environment, making it easy for
operations teams to deploy, monitor, backup and scale
MongoDB. The capabilities of Ops Manager are also
available in the MongoDB Cloud Manager tool hosted in
the cloud. Organizations who run with MongoDB Enterprise
Advanced can choose between Ops Manager and Cloud
Manager for their deployments.
Ops Manager incorporates best practices to help keep
managed databases healthy and optimized. They ensures
operational continuity by converting complex manual tasks
into reliable, automated procedures with the click of a
button.
Deployment. Any topology, at any scale;
Upgrade. In minutes, with no downtime;
Sc
Scale.
ale. Add capacity, without taking the application
offline;
Visualize. Graphically display query performance to
identify and fix slow running operations;
Point-in-time, Sc
Scheduled
heduled Bac
Backups.
kups. Restore
complete running clusters to any point in time with just
a few clicks, because disasters aren't predictable
Performance Alerts. Monitor 100+ system metrics
and get custom alerts before the system degrades.

Deployments and Upgrades

Ops Manager coordinates critical operational tasks across
the servers in a MongoDB system. It communicates with
the infrastructure through agents installed on each server.
The servers can reside in the public cloud or a private data
center. Ops Manager reliably orchestrates the tasks that

In addition to initial deployment, Ops Manager makes it

possible to dynamically resize capacity by adding shards
and replica set members. Other maintenance tasks such as
upgrading MongoDB, building new indexes across replica
sets or resizing the oplog can be reduced from dozens or
hundreds of manual steps to the click of a button, all with
zero downtime.
Administrators can use the Ops Manager interface directly,
or invoke the Ops Manager RESTful API from existing
enterprise tools.

Monitoring
High-performance distributed systems benefit from
comprehensive monitoring. Ops Manager and Cloud
Manager have been developed to give administrators the
insights needed to ensure smooth operations and a great
experience for end users.
Featuring charts, custom dashboards, and automated
alerting, Ops Manager tracks 100+ key database and
systems health metrics including operations counters,
memory and CPU utilization, replication status, open
connections, queues and any node status.
The metrics are securely reported to Ops Manager where
they are processed, aggregated, alerted and visualized in a
browser, letting administrators easily determine the health
of MongoDB in real-time. Historic performance can be
reviewed in order to create operational baselines and to
support capacity planning. The Visual Query Profiler
provides a quick and convenient way for DBAs to analyze
the performance of specific queries or query families. It can
also provide recommendations on the addition of indexes
that would improve performance of common operations.
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Figur
Figure
e 9: Ops Manager self-service portal: simple, intuitive and powerful. Deploy and upgrade entire clusters with a single
click.
Integration with existing monitoring tools is also
straightforward via the Ops Manager and Cloud Manager
RESTful API, and with packaged integrations to leading
Application Performance Management (APM) platforms
such as New Relic. This integration allows MongoDB
status to be consolidated and monitored alongside the rest

of your application infrastructure, all from a single pane of

glass.
Ops Manager allows administrators to set custom alerts
when key metrics are out of range. Alerts can be
configured for a range of parameters affecting individual
hosts, replica sets, agents and backup. Alerts can be sent
via SMS and email or integrated into existing incident
management systems such as PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat
and others to proactively warn of potential issues, before
they escalate to costly outages.
If using Cloud Manager, access to real-time monitoring
data can also be shared with MongoDB support engineers,
providing fast issue resolution by eliminating the need to
ship logs between different teams.

Figur
Figure
e1
10:
0: Ops Manager provides real time & historic
visibility into the MongoDB deployment.

Disaster Recovery: Backups &

Point-in-Time Recovery
A backup and recovery strategy is necessary to protect
your mission-critical data against catastrophic failure, such
14

as a fire or flood in a data center, or human error, such as

code errors or accidentally dropping collections. With a
backup and recovery strategy in place, administrators can
restore business operations without data loss, and the
organization can meet regulatory and compliance
requirements. Taking regular backups offers other
advantages, as well. The backups can be used to create
new environments for development, staging, or QA without
impacting production.
Ops Manager and Cloud Manager backups are maintained
continuously, just a few seconds behind the operational
system. Because Ops Manager only reads the oplog, the
ongoing performance impact is minimal similar to that of
adding an additional replica to a replica set. If the
MongoDB cluster experiences a failure, the most recent
backup is only moments behind, minimizing exposure to
data loss. Ops Manager and Cloud Manager offer
point-in-time backup of replica sets and cluster-wide
snapshots of sharded clusters. You can restore to precisely
the moment you need, quickly and safely.
Automation-driven restores allows fully a configured
cluster to be re-deployed directly from the database
snapshots in a just few clicks.
By using MongoDB Enterprise Advanced you can deploy
Ops Manager to control backups in your local data center,
or use the Cloud Manager service which offers a fully
managed backup solution with a pay-as-you-go model.
Dedicated MongoDB engineers monitor user backups on a
24x365 basis, alerting operations teams if problems arise.

SNMP: Integrating MongoDB with

External Monitoring Solutions
In addition to Ops Manager and Cloud Manager, MongoDB
Enterprise Advanced can report system information to
SNMP traps, supporting centralized data collection and
aggregation via external monitoring solutions. Review the
documentation to learn more about SNMP integration.

MongoDB Atlas: Database as a

Service For MongoDB
MongoDB Atlas provides all of the features of MongoDB,
without the operational heavy lifting required for any new
application. MongoDB Atlas is available on-demand
through a pay-as-you-go model and billed on an hourly
basis, letting you focus on what you do best.
Its easy to get started use a simple GUI to select the
instance size, region, and features you need. MongoDB
Atlas provides:
Security features to protect access to your data
Built in replication for always-on availability, tolerating
complete data center failure
Backups and point in time recovery to protect against
data corruption
Fine-grained monitoring to let you know when to scale.
Additional instances can be provisioned with the push
of a button
Automated patching and one-click upgrades for new
major versions of the database, enabling you to take
advantage of the latest and greatest MongoDB features
A choice of cloud providers, regions, and billing options
MongoDB Atlas is versatile. Its great for everything from a
quick Proof of Concept, to test/QA environments, to
complete production clusters. If you decide you want to
bring operations back under your control, it is easy to move
your databases onto your own infrastructure and manage
them using MongoDB Ops Manager or MongoDB Cloud
Manager. The user experience across MongoDB Atlas,
Cloud Manager, and Ops Manager is consistent, ensuring
that disruption is minimal if you decide to migrate to your
own infrastructure.
MongoDB Atlas is automated, its easy, and its from the
creators of MongoDB. Learn more and take it for a spin.

Conclusion
MongoDB is the database for today's applications:
innovative, fast time-to-market, globally scalable, reliable,
15

and inexpensive to operate. In this guide we have explored

the fundamental concepts and assumptions that underly
the architecture of MongoDB. Other guides on topics such
as Operations Best Practices can be found at
mongodb.com.

We Can Help
We are the MongoDB experts. Over 2,000 organizations
rely on our commercial products, including startups and
more than 50% of the Fortune 100. We offer software and
services to make your life easier:
MongoDB Enterprise Advanced is the best way to run
MongoDB in your data center. Its a finely-tuned package
of advanced software, support, certifications, and other
services designed for the way you do business.
MongoDB Atlas is a database as a service for MongoDB,
letting you focus on apps instead of ops. With MongoDB
Atlas, you only pay for what you use with a convenient
hourly billing model. With the click of a button, you can
scale up and down when you need to, with no downtime,
full security, and high performance.

MongoDB Consulting packages get you to production

faster, help you tune performance in production, help you
scale, and free you up to focus on your next release.
MongoDB Training helps you become a MongoDB expert,
from design to operating mission-critical systems at scale.
Whether youre a developer, DBA, or architect, we can
make you better at MongoDB.

Resources
For more information, please visit mongodb.com or contact
us at [email protected].
Case Studies (mongodb.com/customers)
Presentations (mongodb.com/presentations)
Free Online Training (university.mongodb.com)
Webinars and Events (mongodb.com/events)
Documentation (docs.mongodb.com)
MongoDB Enterprise Download (mongodb.com/download)
MongoDB Atlas database as a service for MongoDB
(mongodb.com/cloud)

MongoDB Cloud Manager is a cloud-based tool that helps

you manage MongoDB on your own infrastructure. With
automated provisioning, fine-grained monitoring, and
continuous backups, you get a full management suite that
reduces operational overhead, while maintaining full control
over your databases.
MongoDB Professional helps you manage your
deployment and keep it running smoothly. It includes
support from MongoDB engineers, as well as access to
MongoDB Cloud Manager.
Development Support helps you get up and running quickly.
It gives you a complete package of software and services
for the early stages of your project.

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