Chapter 10. WiredTiger and pluggable storage
This chapter covers
- WiredTiger
- Pluggable storage engines
- A comparison between MMAPv1 and WiredTiger
With version 3.0, MongoDB introduced the Pluggable Storage Engine API as one of its major changes. In this chapter, we’ll talk about what exactly it is and why it has been added to MongoDB. We’ll talk about WiredTiger, a pluggable storage engine that’s bundled with MongoDB, and compare it with the default storage engine that MongoDB has used up until version 3.0. We’ll compare the two engines in terms of speed, disk use, and latency. We’ll also introduce several other pluggable storage engines that are expected to become interesting alternatives. For the more advanced readers, we’ll uncover the technology behind pluggable storage engines.
An application programming interface (API) is a relatively strict set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. As an example, you should be aware by now that MongoDB offers an API that allows other software to interact with MongoDB without using the MongoDB shell: each of the MongoDB drivers that you’ve been using use the API provided by MongoDB to add driver functionality. They allow your application to communicate with the MongoDB database and to perform the basic CRUD operations on your documents in the database.