Chapter 4. Document-oriented data
In this chapter
- Schema design
- Data models for e-commerce
- Databases, collections, and documents
This chapter takes a closer look at document-oriented data modeling and at how data is organized at the database, collection, and document levels in MongoDB. I’ll start with a brief, general discussion of schema design. This is helpful because a large number of MongoDB users have never designed schemas for databases other than the traditional RDBMS. 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.