Preface

MongoDB is a document-oriented, leading NoSQL database, which offers linear scalability, thus making it a good contender for high-volume, high-performance systems across all the business domains. It has an edge over the majority of NoSQL solutions for its ease of use, high performance, and rich features.

This book provides detailed recipes that describe how to use the different features of MongoDB. The recipes cover topics ranging from setting up MongoDB, knowing its programming language API, and monitoring and administration, to some advanced topics such as cloud deployment, integration with Hadoop, and some open source and proprietary tools for MongoDB. The recipe format presents the information in a concise, actionable form; this lets you refer to the recipe to address and know the details of just the use case in hand without going through the entire book.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Installing and Starting the Server, is all about starting MongoDB. It will demonstrate how to start the server in the standalone mode, as a replica set, and as a shard, with the provided start up options from the command line or configuration file.

Chapter 2, Command-line Operations and Indexes, has simple recipes to perform CRUD operations in the Mongo shell and create various types of indexes in the shell.

Chapter 3, Programming Language Drivers, discusses about programming language APIs. Though Mongo supports a vast array of languages, we will look at how to use the drivers to connect to the MongoDB server from Java and Python programs only. This chapter also explores the MongoDB wire protocol used for communication between the server and programming language clients.

Chapter 4, Administration, contains many recipes for administration or your MongoDB deployment. This chapter covers a lot of frequently used administrative tasks such as viewing the stats of the collections and database, viewing and killing long-running operations and other replica sets, and sharding-related administration.

Chapter 5, Advanced Operations, is an extension of Chapter 2, Command-line Operations and Indexes. We will look at some of the slightly advanced features such as implementing server-side scripts, geospatial search, GridFS, full text search, and how to integrate MongoDB with an external full text search engine.

Chapter 6, Monitoring and Backups, tells you all about administration and some basic monitoring. However, MongoDB provides a state-of-the-art monitoring and real-time backup service, MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS). In this chapter, we will look at some recipes around monitoring and backup using MMS.

Chapter 7, Deploying MongoDB on the Cloud, covers recipes that use MongoDB service providers for cloud deployment. We will set up our own MongoDB server on the AWS cloud as well as run MongoDB in Docker containers.

Chapter 8, Integration with Hadoop, covers recipes to integrate MongoDB with Hadoop to use the Hadoop MapReduce API in order to run MapReduce jobs on the data residing in MongoDB data files and write the results to them. We will also see how to use AWS EMR to run our MapReduce jobs on the cloud using Amazon's Hadoop cluster, EMR, with the mongo-hadoop connector.

Chapter 9, Open Source and Proprietary Tools, is about using frameworks and products built around MongoDB to improve a developer's productivity or about simplifying some of the day-to-day jobs using Mongo. Unless explicitly mentioned, the products/frameworks that we will be looking at in this chapter are open source.

Appendix, Concepts for Reference, gives you a bit of additional information on the write concern and read preference for reference.

What you need for this book

The version of MongoDB used to try out the recipes is 3.0.2. The recipes are good for version 2.6.x as well. In case of some special feature specific to version 2.6.x, it would be explicitly mentioned in the recipe. Unless explicitly mentioned, all commands should be executed on Ubuntu Linux.

The samples where Java programming was involved were tested and run on Java Version 1.7, and Python code was run using Python v2.7 (compatible with Python 3). For MongoDB drivers, you can choose to use the latest available version.

These are pretty common types of software, and their minimum versions are used across different recipes. All the recipes in this book will mention the required software to complete it and their respective versions. Some recipes need to be tested on a Windows system, while some on Linux.

Who this book is for

This book is designed for administrators and developers who are interested in knowing MongoDB and using it as a high-performance and scalable data storage. It is also for those who know the basics of MongoDB and would like to expand their knowledge. The audience of this book is expected to have at least some basic knowledge of MongoDB.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Create the /data/mongo/db directory (or any of your choice)."

A block of code is set as follows:

   import com.mongodb.DB;
   import com.mongodb.DBCollection;
   import com.mongodb.DBObject;
   import com.mongodb.MongoClient;

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install default-jdk

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "As we want to start a free micro instance, check the Free tier only checkbox on the left".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.

Piracy

Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.

Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.

We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.

Questions

You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.