If you have questions about “Is MongoDB a relational or non-relational database?” I have you covered. Here, I have explained in detail whether MongoDB is relational or non-relational.
Additionally, you will understand how the MongoDB database works, its history, and its advantages. You will also understand some terminology in MongoDB, like collection documents and how they are represented.
After completing this tutorial, your doubts related to MongoDB will become transparent.
Is MongoDB a Relational Database
MongoDB is not a relational database; instead, it is a non-relational database. But what is the difference between a relational and non-relational database?
Let’s start with a relational database. A relational database stores information in a structured way. For example, a MySQL database stores information in tabular form. Here, tabular refers to the table, which means data are stored in rows and columns.
Each table can be related to another table based on its key column, so a table can have relationships with other tables in the database. This is why it is called a relational database.
Whereas non-relational databases like MongoDB, which is also called NoSQL (not only SQL), store information in different database types, such as document, key-value, and graph databases.
But here we are talking about MongoDB. It stores data in documents, not tables like MySQL. It can process different types of data, such as structured, semi-structured, and unstructured.
Let’s know more about MongoDB.
MongoDB
MongoDB is a non-relational database that stores data in a document model consisting of key-value pairs; in other words, MongoDB stores the information in BSON format which is like JSON format.
Let’s understand how the MongoDB database works.
How Database Works
To understand the workings of the MongodDB, first, you must understand some terminology like database, collection and documents.
As you know, a database stores information and MongoDB is a non-relational or document-oriented database.
To store the information in the MongoDB database, first, you will need to know about “what is a collection in MongoDB?”.
A collection is like a table that stores a single or multiple documents. You can create as many collections as you want, each containing a single or multiple documents, where each document stores the data.
A document is a set of key-value pairs. It has a dynamic schema, which means that within the same collection, the fields or structure do not need to be the same, and common fields in a collection’s documents may hold different types of data.
Let me show you how to store data in MongoDB as a document.
{
name: "James",
age: 25,
country: "USA",
city: "Chicago",
profile_image: "https://cloud/image/qenj233nn3h
skills: ["MongodDB", "Python"]
}Look at how data is stored as a key-value pair, called a document. Similarly, you can create multiple documents in a single collection and have multiple collections in the database.
History of MongoDB
The MongoDB database was released in February 2009. It is managed by MongoDB. Inc. under SSPL(Server Side Public License). It is an open-source product developed and supported by 10gen.
It provides official driver support for all the popular languages, such as C, C++, C#, .Net, Goes, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, Swift, etc., so you can easily create an application using any of these languages.
Advantages of MongoDB
There are advantages of MongoDB, which are discussed below.
- Highly Scalability: By adding more servers to the MongoDB clusters, the system can be scaled horizontally to handle large amounts of data and traffic loads.
- Good Performance: It provides high performance when performing reading and writing operations to the database. It is based on the document-oriented model and has indexing capabilities, which allow the retrieval or query of the data efficiently.
- Flexibility: It is very flexible, which means it stores the data in documents, which allows you to store different types of data without a predefined schema like a relational database.
- Documents allow you to define different types of fields, so they are very useful in situations where you need to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
- Supports Various Programming Languages: MongoDB has a library, tools, and resources for integrating with different applications or programming languages. Its large community of developers continuously contributes to it.
Conclusion
In this MongoDB tutorial, you learned MongoDB is a non-relational document-oriented database that stores information in a collection of documents in different shapes and sizes. You also learned the difference between relational and non-relational databases.
After that you learned about how database works with its history and advantages.
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