The MongoDB Basics: Databases, Collections & Documents

To understand the MongoDB basics, we need to look at how data is stored in MongoDB.

Data in MongoDB is made up of three types of components: databases, collections, and documents. The database sits at the top of the hierarchy, collections at the next level, and documents at the bottom.

A database provides a container for storing and organizing data.

Each database contains one or more collections, and each collection contains zero or more documents.

A database can contain multiple collections, but a collection cannot span multiple databases. Likewise, a collection can contain multiple documents, but a document cannot span multiple collections.

Studio 3T organizes and presents data elements based on the MongoDB document structure, which makes it a handy tool for understanding that structure.

In the following sections, you’ll apply what you’ve learned from the MongoDB basics and use Studio 3T to create a database and a collection and add documents to the collection, importing the documents from a .json file. You’ll then query the documents, view the results in different views, and then update some of the values.