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Rozgonyi
Rozgonyi

Reputation: 1059

Using a Database vs a Collection in MongoDB

I am building a site with users who have discussions and write blogs and plan to use MongoDB as the database for the site. Which architecture option would be more efficient and allow for easier data flow between them:

  1. One Database with a Blogs Collection, a Discussions Collection, and a User Activity Collection? Each collection would be sharded as appropriate.

  2. A Blogs Database, a Discussions Database, and a User Activity Database? Each database would be broken into collections and sha rded as appropriate.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 188

Answers (2)

Asya Kamsky
Asya Kamsky

Reputation: 42352

It won't make a big difference whether you put everything into a single database or into multiple databases until you find you need to do something that's handled on the database level, for example access control, or placing database files on separate physical devices (to reduce I/O contention).

In addition, currently locking granularity is on the database level so if you happen to have a very large number of small writes having them go to different databases will mean that they will not be contending for the same lock. Since you anticipate sharding you can also place each database on a different shard which may allow you to defer actually needing to shard any particular collection as each shard would only be handling the traffic for that database's collection(s).

I would say if you are in doubt go ahead and put them in separate databases, it's unlikely to hurt and it may help.

Upvotes: 1

ebi
ebi

Reputation: 4902

Mongo will work, but getting familiar with it may take time depending on your experience.

If you use MySQL (or another SQL db) you may have an easier time. You should probably just create separate tables for your blogs, discussions, and activity, rather than multiple databases.

Another factor to consider is the size of your databases. An SQL database is fine for most applications, even fairly large ones. MongoDB (and other NoSQL db's) are great for scaling big data.

Hope this helps!

Upvotes: 0

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