Scaling MongoDB

Chapter 2. Understanding Sharding

To set up, administrate, or debug a cluster, you have to understand the basic scheme of how sharding works. This chapter covers the basics so that you can reason about what’s going on.

Splitting Up Data

A shard is one or more servers in a cluster that are responsible for some subset of the data. For instance, if we had a cluster that contained 1,000,000 documents representing a website’s users, one shard might contain information about 200,000 of the users.

A shard can consist of many servers. If there is more than one server in a shard, each server has an identical copy of the subset of data (Figure 2-1). In production, a shard will usually be a replica set.

Figure 2-1. A shard contains some subset of the data. If a shard contains more than one server, each server has a complete copy of the data.

To evenly distribute data across shards, MongoDB moves subsets of the data from shard to shard. It figures out which subsets to move based on a key that you choose. For example, we might choose to split up a collection of users based on the username field. MongoDB uses range-based splitting; that is, data is split into chunks of given ranges—e.g., ["a”, “f”).

Throughout this text, I’ll use standard range notation to describe ranges. “[” and “]” denote inclusive bounds and “(” and “)” denote exclusive bounds. Thus, the four possible ranges are:

x is in (a, b)

If ...