What is MongoDB?
If you are familiar with relational databases, you will find MongoDB very different. MongoDB is a document-oriented database, which means that it stores data in documents instead of tables. A document is a set of key-value pairs, and it is the basic unit of data in MongoDB. Documents are similar to JSON objects, and they are stored in a collection. A collection is a group of documents that have the same structure. In MongoDB, documents are stored in Binary JSON (BSON), a binary representation of JSON documents.
Figure 12.1 – A SQL data structure compared to a MongoDB data structure
In the preceding diagram, we can see the difference between a relational database and a document-oriented database more clearly.
Versions
There are several versions of MongoDB, but the most popular is MongoDB Community Server. In our project, we will also use MongoDB Community Server as well, at no extra cost to us.
In Chapter 16, we will explore...