Segmenting Data by Location

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Scenario

Procedure

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In sharded clusters, you can create zones of sharded data based on the shard key. You can associate each zone with one or more shards in the cluster. A shard can associate with any number of zones. In a balanced cluster, MongoDB migrates chunks covered by a zone only to those shards associated with the zone.

Tip

By defining the zones and the zone ranges before sharding an empty or a non-existing collection, the shard collection operation creates chunks for the defined zone ranges as well as any additional chunks to cover the entire range of the shard key values and performs an initial chunk distribution based on the zone ranges. This initial creation and distribution of chunks allows for faster setup of zoned sharding. After the initial distribution, the balancer manages the chunk distribution going forward.

See Pre-Define Zones and Zone Ranges for an Empty or Non-Existing Collection for an example.

This tutorial uses Zones to segment data based on a geographic area.

The following are some example use cases for segmenting data by geographic area:

An application that has to segment user data by country
A database that has to allocate resources by country

The following diagram illustrates a sharded cluster that uses geographic zones to manage and satisfy data segmentation requirements.

Scenario

A financial chat application logs messages, tracking the country of the originating user. The application stores the logs in the chat database under the messages collection. The chats contain information that must be segmented by country to have servers local to the country serve read and write requests for the country's users. A group of countries can be assigned same zone in order to share resources.

The application currently has users in the US, UK, and Germany. The country field represents the user's country based on its ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 two-character country codes.

The following documents represent a partial view of three chat messages:

{
  "_id" : ObjectId("56f08c447fe58b2e96f595fa"),
  "country" : "US",
  "userid" : 123,
  "message" : "Hello there",
  ...,
}
{
  "_id" : ObjectId("56f08c447fe58b2e96f595fb"),
  "country" : "UK",
  "userid" : 456,
  "message" : "Good Morning"
  ...,
}
{
  "_id" : ObjectId("56f08c447fe58b2e96f595fc"),
  "country" : "DE",
  "userid" : 789,
  "message" : "Guten Tag"
  ...,
}

Shard Key

The messages collection uses the { country : 1, userid : 1 } compound index as the shard key.

The country field in each document allows for creating a zone for each distinct country value.

The userid field provides a high cardinality and low frequency component to the shard key relative to country.

See Choosing a Shard Key for more general instructions on selecting a shard key.

Architecture

The sharded cluster has shards in two data centers - one in Europe, and one in North America.

Zones

This application requires one zone per data center.

EU - European data center

Shards deployed on this data center are assigned to the EU zone.

For each country using the EU data center for local reads and writes, create a zone range for the EU zone with:

a lower bound of { "country" : <country>, "userid" : MinKey }
an upper bound of { "country" : <country>, "userid" : MaxKey }

NA - North American data center

Shards deployed on this data center are assigned to the NA zone.

For each country using the NA data center for local reads and writes, create a zone range for the NA zone with:

a lower bound of { "country" : <country>, "userid" : MinKey }
an upper bound of { "country" : <country>, "userid" : MaxKey }

Note

The MinKey and MaxKey values are reserved special values for comparisons

Write Operations

With zones, if an inserted or updated document matches a configured zone, it can only be written to a shard inside of that zone.

MongoDB can write documents that do not match a configured zone to any shard in the cluster.

Note

The behavior described above requires the cluster to be in a steady state with no chunks violating a configured zone. See the following section on the balancer for more information.

Read Operations

MongoDB can route queries to a specific shard if the query includes at least the country field.

For example, MongoDB can attempt a targeted read operation on the following query:

chatDB = db.getSiblingDB("chat")
chatDB.messages.find( { "country" : "UK" , "userid" : "123" } )

Queries without the country field perform broadcast operations.

Balancer

The balancer migrates chunks to the appropriate shard respecting any configured zones. Until the migration, shards may contain chunks that violate configured zones. Once balancing completes, shards should only contain chunks whose ranges do not violate its assigned zones.

Adding or removing zones or zone ranges can result in chunk migrations. Depending on the size of your data set and the number of chunks a zone or zone range affects, these migrations may impact cluster performance. Consider running your balancer during specific scheduled windows. See Schedule the Balancing Window for a tutorial on how to set a scheduling window.

Security

For sharded clusters running with Role-Based Access Control, authenticate as a user with at least the clusterManager role on the admin database.

Procedure

You must be connected to a mongos to create zones and zone ranges. You cannot create zones or zone ranges by connecting directly to a shard.

Disable the Balancer (Optional)

To reduce performance impacts, the balancer may be disabled on the collection to ensure no migrations take place while configuring the new zones.

Use sh.disableBalancing(), specifying the namespace of the collection, to stop the balancer.

sh.disableBalancing("chat.message")

Use sh.isBalancerRunning() to check if the balancer process is currently running. Wait until any current balancing rounds have completed before proceeding.

Add each shard to the appropriate zone

Add each shard in the North American data center to the NA zone.

sh.addShardTag(<shard name>, "NA")

Add each shard in the European data center to the EU zone.

sh.addShardTag(<shard name>, "EU")

You can review the zones assigned to any given shard by running sh.status().

Define ranges for each zone

For shard key values where country : US, define a shard key range and associate it to the NA zone using the sh.addTagRange() method. This method requires:

The full namespace of the target collection.
The inclusive lower bound of the range.
The exclusive upper bound of the range.
The name of the zone.

sh.addTagRange( 
  "chat.messages",
  { "country" : "US", "userid" : MinKey },
  { "country" : "US", "userid" : MaxKey }, 
  "NA"
)

For shard key values where country : UK, define a shard key range and associate it to the EU zone using the sh.addTagRange() method. This method requires:

The full namespace of the target collection.
The inclusive lower bound of the range.
The exclusive upper bound of the range.
The name of the zone.

sh.addTagRange( 
  "chat.messages",
  { "country" : "UK", "userid" : MinKey },
  { "country" : "UK", "userid" : MaxKey }, 
  "EU"
)

For shard key values where country : DE, define a shard key range and associate it to the EU zone using the sh.addTagRange() method. This method requires:

The full namespace of the target collection.
The inclusive lower bound of the range.
The exclusive upper bound of the range.
The name of the zone.

sh.addTagRange( 
  "chat.messages",
  { "country" : "DE", "userid" : MinKey },
  { "country" : "DE", "userid" : MaxKey }, 
  "EU"
)

The MinKey and MaxKey values are reserved special value for comparisons. MinKey always compares as lower than every other possible value, while MaxKey always compares as higher than every other possible value. The configured ranges captures every user for each device.

Both country : UK and country : DE are assigned to the EU zone. This associates any document with either UK or DE as the value for country to the EU data center.

Enable the Balancer (Optional)

If the balancer was disabled in previous steps, re-enable the balancer at the completion of this procedure to rebalance the cluster.

Use sh.enableBalancing(), specifying the namespace of the collection, to start the balancer.

sh.enableBalancing("chat.message")

Use sh.isBalancerRunning() to check if the balancer process is currently running.

Review the Changes

The next time the balancer runs, it splits chunks where necessary and migrates chunks across the shards respecting the configured zones.

Once balancing finishes:

shards in the NA zone should only contain documents with country : US, and
shards in the EU zone should only contain documents with country : UK or country : DE.

A document with a value for country other than US, UK, or DE can reside on any shard in the cluster.

To confirm the chunk distribution, run sh.status().

Updating Zones

The application requires the following updates:

Documents with country : UK must now be associated to the new UK data center. Any data in the EU data center must be migrated
The chat application now supports users in Mexico. Documents with country : MX must be routed to the NA data center.

Perform the following procedures to update the zone ranges.

Disable the Balancer (Optional)

To reduce performance impacts, the balancer may be disabled on the collection to ensure no migrations take place while configuring the new zones or removing the old ones.

Use sh.disableBalancing(), specifying the namespace of the collection, to stop the balancer

sh.disableBalancing("chat.messages")

Use sh.isBalancerRunning() to check if the balancer process is currently running. Wait until any current balancing rounds have completed before proceeding.

Add the new `UK` zone

Add each shard in the UK data center to the UK zone.

sh.addShardTag("<shard name>", "UK")

You can review the zones assigned to any given shard by running sh.status().

Remove the old zone range

Remove the old zone range associated to the UK country using the sh.removeTagRange() method. This method requires:

The full namespace of the target collection.
The inclusive lower bound of the range.
The exclusive upper bound of the range.

sh.removeTagRange(
  "chat.messages",
  { "country" : "UK", "userid" : MinKey },
  { "country" : "UK", "userid" : MaxKey }
)

Add new zone ranges

For shard key values where country : UK, define a shard key range and associate it to the UK zone using the sh.addTagRange() method. This method requires:

The full namespace of the target collection.
The inclusive lower bound of the range.
The exclusive upper bound of the range.
The name of the zone.

sh.addTagRange( 
  "chat.message",
  { "country" : "UK", "userid" : MinKey },
  { "country" : "UK", "userid" : MaxKey }, 
  "UK"
)

For shard key values where country : MX, define a shard key range and associate it to the NA zone using the sh.addTagRange() method. This method requires:

The full namespace of the target collection.
The inclusive lower bound of the range.
The exclusive upper bound of the range.
The name of the zone.

sh.addTagRange( 
  "chat.messages",
  { "country" : "MX", "userid" : MinKey },
  { "country" : "MX", "userid" : MaxKey }, 
  "NA"
)

The MinKey and MaxKey values are reserved special values for comparisons. MinKey always compares as lower than every other possible value, while MaxKey always compares as higher than every other possible value. This ensures the two ranges captures the entire possible value space of userid.

Enable the Balancer (Optional)

If the balancer was disabled in previous steps, re-enable the balancer at the completion of this procedure to rebalance the cluster.

Use sh.enableBalancing(), specifying the namespace of the collection, to start the balancer

sh.enableBalancing("chat.messages")

Use sh.isBalancerRunning() to check if the balancer process is currently running.

Review the changes

The next time the balancer runs, it splits chunks where necessary and migrates chunks across the shards respecting the configured zones.

Before balancing:

shards in the EU zone only contain documents where country : DE or country : UK, and
documents where country : MX could be stored on any shard in the sharded cluster.

After balancing:

shards in the EU zone only contain documents where country : DE,
shards in the UK zone only contain documents where country : UK, and
shards in the NA zone only contain documents where country : US or country : MX.

A document with a value for country other than US, MX, UK, or DE can reside on any shard in the cluster.

To confirm the chunk distribution, run sh.status().

Tip

Scenario

Shard Key

Architecture

Zones

Note

Write Operations

Note

Read Operations

Balancer

Security

Procedure

Disable the Balancer (Optional)

Add each shard to the appropriate zone

Define ranges for each zone

Enable the Balancer (Optional)

Review the Changes

Updating Zones

Disable the Balancer (Optional)

Add the new UK zone

Remove the old zone range

Add new zone ranges

Enable the Balancer (Optional)

Review the changes

Tip

See also:

Add the new `UK` zone