§2023-07-26

• Understanding MongoDB’s Sharding Topology

• When working with a standalone MongoDB database server, you connect to that instance and use it to directly manage your data.

• In an unsharded replica set, you connect to the cluster’s primary member, and any changes you make to the data there are automatically carried over to the set’s secondary members.

¶ Sharding

• horizontal scaling, also known as scaling out, since it splits up records from one data set across multiple machines. If the workload becomes too great for the shards in your cluster, you can scale out your database by adding another separate shard to take on some of the work.
• This contrasts with vertical scaling, also known as scaling up, which involves migrating one’s resources to larger or more powerful hardware.

Because data is physically divided into multiple database nodes in a sharded database architecture, some documents will be available only on one node, while others will reside on another server. If you decided to connect to a particular instance to query the data, only a subset of the data would be available to you. Additionally, if you were to directly change any data held on one shard, you run the risk of creating inconsistency between your shards.

To mitigate these risks, sharded clusters in MongoDB are made up of three separate components:

1. Shard servers are individual MongoDB instances used to store a subset of a larger collection of data. Every shard server must always be deployed as a replica set. There must be a minimum of one shard in a sharded cluster, but to gain any benefits from sharding you will need at least two.
2. The cluster’s config server is a MongoDB instance that stores metadata and configuration settings for the sharded cluster. The cluster uses this metadata for setup and management purposes. Like shard servers, the config server must be deployed as a replica set to ensure that this metadata remains highly available.
3. mongos is a special type of MongoDB instance that serves as a query router. mongos acts as a proxy between client applications and the sharded cluster, and is responsible for deciding where to direct a given query. Every application connection goes through a query router in a sharded cluster, thereby hiding the complexity of the configuration from the application.

Because sharding in MongoDB is done at a collection level, a single database can contain a mixture of sharded and unsharded collections. Although sharded collections are partitioned and distributed across the multiple shards of the cluster, one shard is always elected as a primary shard. Unsharded collections are stored in their entirety on this primary shard.

Since every application connection must go through the mongos instance, the mongos query router is what’s responsible for making all data consistently available and distributed across individual shards.

Return to Top