A Sharding Tale: Then, Now, There, and Back Again

Sharding in MongoDB is used to horizontally scale databases by distributing large data sets across multiple machines. In the past, this usually involved using lower-cost commodity hardware in your data center or infrastructure. More recently this often involves adding more storage and more compute nodes to your cloud, hybrid, or on-prem environment. Either way, sharding is one of the most important features for scaling out your MongoDB environment. This presentation will cover how sharding has changed from the earlier versions of MongoDB to now – focusing on changes from 3.6 immutable shard keys to the latest 4.4 version with its renable shard keys. We will discuss proposed changes coming in 5.0. We will take a look at sharding feature enhancements but we will also take a look at the real-life, practical impacts to performance, storage, and other aspects of your overall application. Finally, we will cover shard key selection tips and how to implement sharding in the most effective ways. Speaker: Kimberly Wilkins – Percona