Introducing MongoDB, a document database
MongoDB, at the time of writing, is the most popular NoSQL database. Unlike Structured Query Language (SQL) databases (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL), NoSQL means that the database specifically does not use SQL to query the database. Instead, NoSQL databases have various other ways to query the database and often have a vastly different structure of how data is stored and queried.
The following main types of NoSQL databases exist:
- Key-value stores (for example, Valkey/Redis)
- Column-oriented databases (for example, Amazon Redshift)
- Graph-based databases (for example, Neo4j)
- Document-based databases (for example, MongoDB)
Figure 2.7 – Overview of NoSQL databases
MongoDB is a document-based database, which means that each entry in the database is stored as a document. In MongoDB, these documents are basically JSON objects (internally, they are stored as BSON – a binary JSON format...
