An introduction to MongoDB

Let's start with a short but informative tour of MongoDB, which will give you the essential knowledge that you need in order to effectively work with it.

First, let's get a good grasp of how data is organized in a MongoDB instance. This will give us the foundation that is required to understand how storage and retrieval operations work later on.

Documents

MongoDB is a NoSQL Database Management System (DBMS). This means that it eschews the traditional table-based data storage model used by SQL-oriented systems such as MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Instead, it stores data as documents, which are data structures that are almost identical to standard JSON objects. For example, a MongoDB document can look like this:

{
  "_id" : ObjectId("547cb6f109ce675dbffe0da5"),
  "name" : "Fleur-De-Lys Pharmacy",
  "licenseNumber" : "DL 133",
  "address" : "430, Triq Fleur-de-Lys",
  "geolocation" : {
  "lat" : 35.8938857,
  "lng" : 14.46954679999999
  },
  "postCode" : ...