Chapter 4. Document-oriented data
This chapter covers
- Schema design
- Data models for e-commerce
- Nuts and bolts of databases, collections, and documents
This chapter takes a close look at document-oriented data modeling and how data is organized at the database, collection, and document levels in MongoDB. We’ll start with a brief, general discussion of how to design schemas to use with MongoDB. Remember, MongoDB itself doesn’t enforce a schema, but every application needs some basic internal standards about how its data is stored. This exploration of principles sets the stage for the second part of the chapter, where we examine the design of an e-commerce schema in MongoDB. Along the way, you’ll see how this schema differs from an equivalent RDBMS schema, and you’ll learn how the typical relationships between entities, such as one-to-many and many-to-many, are represented in MongoDB. The e-commerce schema presented here will also serve as a basis for our discussions of queries, aggregation, and updates in subsequent chapters.