Mastering Sharding

Sharding is the ability to horizontally scale out our database by partitioning our datasets across different servers—shards. This has been a feature of MongoDB since version 1.6 (v1.6) was released in August 2010. Foursquare and Bitly are two of MongoDB’s most famous early customers and have used the sharding feature from its inception all the way to its general release.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following topics:

• How to design a sharding cluster and how to make the important decision of choosing the shard key
• Different sharding techniques and how to monitor and administrate sharded clusters
• The mongos router and how it is used to route our queries across different shards
• How we can recover from errors in our shards

By the end of this chapter, we will have mastered the underlying theory and concepts as well as the practical implementation of sharding using MongoDB.

This chapter covers...