What are best practices for partitioning data in MongoDB?

Question

I'm creating a social site using mean stack and I need some suggestions regarding mongoDB and mongoose. I'm part of a startup and we decided to use these amazing technologies to fulfil our task.

Basically, I need some suggestions.

Currently, I have finished creation of simple CRUD and implemented local passport JS. I have currently one single collection in my mongoDB called users.

Our social site will have a blog, marketplace and many other pages (features) that will be related to a single user.

Since I never worked with mongoDB before, I'm curious if mongoDB should use one collection per user or have multiple collections for each feature.

To clarify it, let's say I use User model for user registration, blog model for blogs etc etc.

This would really mean a lot to me if you would shortly explain me how to structure my mongoose models, if all data should be inside one collection or if one user should have separate collections for different features. And if you recommend multiple collections, how do I then link these collections together and make sure that all data is saved for one user etc.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

I will explain partitioning/dividing into two level.

1. Of course, you're going to create different collections for different models. Such as Users, Blogs, Messages etc.

2. Now comes the 2nd part, if we are talking about millions of data. How you partition them for faster data lookup. For example, you have 1M users, which you are going to put in one big collection of 'Users'. But if you look for a user whose first name is 'Imdad' and age is 28, Now your query looks through these 1M items in your single Users collection, which will take a good amount of time.

To solve this problem, users collection can be divided into multiple collections through horizontal partition (Users1 (age between 10-20), Users2 (age between 20-30), Users3 (age between 30-40)). Now based on your query predicate monggoDB is to look up into a different collection/s. This is the idea that MongoDB has applied like other SQL DB. You don't have to explicitly execute your query to the chunk collection but the mongoDB itself take care of that.

Shard key generation

Mongoose shard key