In this tutorial, we will discuss the following topics:
What is MongoDB
MongoDB is a document-oriented as well as a NoSQL database
program. It can handle large volumes of data. As it is a
NoSQL database, it stores data as documents, and the same type of
documents are kept in the collection. Traditional relational databases use
rows inside a table to store data but MongoDB uses documents, which is
actually a JSON-like structure, to store data.
The general structure of any MongoDB database is as follows:
Documents in MongoDB
A record in traditional relational databases is a row inside a table.
But MongoDB saves records as documents. The structure of a
document is similar to a JSON object. We keep data in
JSON in key (field) and value pair, as shown in the figure below. In
documents, data is also kept in key (field) and value
pair. When we view or update documents in Mongo Shell we are working with
JSON.
But there are some drawbacks of JSON, such as JSON being text-based and
only supporting a limited data type. So MongoDB actually stores data in
memory in BSON format. BSON stands for
binary representation of JSON documents. The main advantage of
BSON is it is fast and flexible. It also supports data types like
date and binary data along with other data types like String, Number,
Boolean, Array, etc. So with these data types, we can store and retrieve
data from MongoDB with other programming languages.
Data in MongoDB is stored as BSON and viewed as JSON.
Connect to MongoDB
To play with MongoDB you need a MongoDB server like other relational
databases. You can install a MongoDB server (mongo daemon) in your
local machine or you can use
MONGODB ATLAS
which is basically a MongoDB server hosted in the cloud and you can easily
connect and execute queries to the cloud DB from your local machine command
prompt/terminal. I have installed MongoDB on my local Windows 10 machine.
Install MongoDB on Windows
To download the MongoDB community server, open this link -
MongoDB Community Download. On the download page, you can download msi or zip file from ‘Available
Downloads’ for Windows. I have downloaded the zip file. Actually, this zip
contains all binary files that are required to run the MongoDB server.
Now unzip the zip file in the preferred location. Inside the folder, you can
find the ‘bin’ folder and inside ‘bin’ folder you can find two
.exe files: 1. mongod.exe, 2. mongo.exe.
Here, ‘mongod.exe’ is a Mongo Daemon that runs in the background and it will accept
connection/request from MongoDB, it is a background process/service. And ‘mongo.exe’ is a command line shell that helps us to work with a database. So we need
to run ‘mongod.exe’ first (in the background), then we run the mongo shell (mongo.exe)
to interact with the MongoDB database.
We need to add the ‘bin’ folder path (the folder which contains
‘mongod.exe’ and ‘mongo.exe’) in the environment variable’s
PATH variable so that we can run ‘mongod.exe’ and ‘mongo.exe’
from the command prompt/terminal.
Now create a folder named ‘data’ in the C drive on your local machine and
inside the ‘data’ folder create another folder named ‘db’. This ‘db’
folder contains all database files. This step is very important,
otherwise, the Mongo daemon will not start.
Now it is time to run the Mongo daemon. Open the command prompt and enter:
mongod
To start Mongo shell you have to give the following command in the command
prompt/terminal which will connect to a Mongo Daemon server that is
running on localhost with default port 27017:
mongo
Now you have entered the Mongo shell:
So in this tutorial, we have learned what MongoDB is and how to start Mongo
shell in a local machine.
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