1.6. Summary

We’ve covered a lot. To summarize, MongoDB is an open source, document-based database management system. Designed for the data and scalability requirements of modern internet applications, MongoDB features dynamic queries and secondary indexes; fast atomic updates and complex aggregations; and support for replication with automatic failover and sharding for scaling horizontally.

That’s a mouthful; but if you’ve read this far, you should have a good feel for all these capabilities. You’re probably itching to code. After all, it’s one thing to talk about a database’s features, but another to use the database in practice. Fortunately, that’s what you’ll be doing in the next two chapters. First, you’ll get acquainted with the MongoDB JavaScript shell, which is incredibly useful for interacting with the database. Then, in chapter 3, you’ll start experimenting with the driver, and you’ll build a simple MongoDB-based application in Ruby.