Sessions at MongoSV 2011 about Schema Design on Friday 9th December

One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don't always apply to MongoDB. The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense. Understandably, this begets good questions: Are foreign keys permissible, or is it better to represent one-to-many relations withing a single document? Are join tables necessary, or is there another technique for building out many-to-many relationships? What level of denormalization is appropriate? How do my data modeling decisions affect the efficiency of updates and queries? In this session, we'll answer these questions and more, provide a number of data modeling rules of thumb, and discuss the tradeoffs of various data modeling strategies.

MongoDB has been designed for versatility, but the techniques you might use to build, say, an analytics engine or a hierarchical data store might not be obvious. In this talk, we'll learn about MongoDB in practice by looking at four hypothetical application designs (based on real-world designs, of course). Topics to be covered include schema design, indexing, transactions (gasp!), trees, what's fast, and what's not. Sprinkled with tips, tricks, shoots, ladders, and trap doors, you're guaranteed to learn something new in this interdisciplinary talk.

Schema design is a critical step in making sure an application scales well. Schema design will impact various performance critical aspects of your deployment including index size, working set size, disk IOPS, query/update efficiency and data transfer rates. We’ll use real world use cases to examine how schema design impacts performance and what you can do to make your design rock solid.

This talk goes over various patterns, techniques and best practices around developing webscale applications using MongoDB. We will cover various techniques including a DSL like schema definition tool, benefits of using data abstraction API, and other best practices we have learned.