MongoDB applied design patterns book review.

Disclaimer: I got this book as part of the bloggers review program at O'Reilly.

Overview.

There is a common mistake newcomers to mongoDB made and is treat it as a relational database when designing the schema and operating against it.

This book by Rick Copeland deals with common design patterns of document stores specifically tailored for MongoDB.

The book is divided in two major parts.

The first part will deal with the specific patterns and follow the normal structure of any other pattern book. The second part of the book explore common usage scenarios for databases and how those scenarios can be handled by MongoDB.

I was really happy to see that the book deals with real world examples that go beyond the common blog or social network examples commonly use to demonstrate schema design on document oriented DBMS.

The e-commerce example is particularly interesting as well as the Operational intelligence scenarios.

Each scenario explore reads, writes and explore the different options for indexing.

The discussions regarding sharding and key selection as very interesting as well, specially since it's one of the most complex things to get right.

Conclusion

The books should be mandatory read for any developer that's planning to use MongoDB and is coming from a more traditional background.

It's a fast an easy read and will save you headaches before going to production.

MongoDB is a great database and with the guidance of the book you should be able to complete your project without problems.