MONGODB Best Practices

Summary of Best Practices

• "First class" objects, that are at top level, typically have their own collection.
• Line item detail objects typically are embedded.
• Objects which follow an object modelling "contains" relationship should generally be embedded.
• Many to many relationships are generally done by linking.
• Collections with only a few objects may safely exist as separate collections, as the whole collection is quickly cached in application server memory.
• Embedded objects are a bit harder to link to than "top level" objects in collections.
• It is more difficult to get a system-level view for embedded objects. When needed an operation of this sort is performed by using MongoDB's map/reduce facility.
• If the amount of data to embed is huge (many megabytes), you may reach the limit on size of a single object. See alsoGridFS.
• If performance is an issue, embed.