Segmenting Data by Application or Customer
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 shows you how to segment data using Zones.
Consider the following scenarios where segmenting data by application or customer may be necessary:
A database serving multiple applications
A database serving multiple customers
A database that requires isolating ranges or subsets of application or customer data
A database that requires resource allocation for ranges or subsets of application or customer data
This diagram illustrates a sharded cluster using zones to segment data based on application or customer. This allows for data to be isolated to specific shards. Additionally, each shard can have specific hardware allocated to fit the performance requirement of the data stored on that shard.
Scenario
An application tracks the score of a user along with a client field,
storing scores in the gamify database under the users collection.
Each possible value of client requires its own zone to allow for
data segmentation. It also allows the administrator to optimize the
hardware for each shard associated to a client for performance and cost.
The following documents represent a partial view of two users:
{ "_id" : ObjectId("56f08c447fe58b2e96f595fa"), "client" : "robot", "userid" : 123, "high_score" : 181, ..., } { "_id" : ObjectId("56f08c447fe58b2e96f595fb"), "client" : "fruitos", "userid" : 456, "high_score" : 210, ..., }
Shard Key
The users collection uses the { client : 1, userid : 1 } compound
index as the shard key.
The client field in each document allows creating a zone for each
distinct client 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 application requires adding shard to a zone associated to a specific
client.
The sharded cluster deployment currently consists of four shards.
Zones
For this application, there are two client zones.
- Robot client ("robot")
- This zone represents all documents where
client : robot. - FruitOS client ("fruitos")
- This zone represents all documents where
client : fruitos.
Write Operations
With zones, if an inserted or updated document matches a configured zone, it can only be written to a shard inside 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 client field.
For example, MongoDB can attempt a targeted read operation on the following query:
chatDB = db.getSiblingDB("gamify") chatDB.users.find( { "client" : "robot" , "userid" : "123" } )
Queries without the client 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 associated to the target
sharded cluster to proceed. You cannot create zones or zone ranges by
connecting directly to a shard.
Disable the Balancer
The balancer must 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 shard0000 to the robot zone.
sh.addShardTag("shard0000", "robot")
Add shard0001 to the robot zone.
sh.addShardTag("shard0001", "robot")
Add shard0002 to the fruitos zone.
sh.addShardTag("shard0002", "fruitos")
Add shard0003 to the fruitos zone.
sh.addShardTag("shard0003", "fruitos")
Run sh.status() to review the zone configured for the sharded
cluster.
Define ranges for each zone
Define range for the robot client and associate it to the robot
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( "gamify.users", { "client" : "robot", "userid" : MinKey }, { "client" : "robot", "userid" : MaxKey }, "robot" )
Define range for the fruitos client and associate it to the
fruitos 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( "gamify.users", { "client" : "fruitos", "userid" : MinKey }, { "client" : "fruitos", "userid" : MaxKey }, "fruitos" )
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. The configured ranges captures every
user for each client.
Enable the Balancer
Re-enable the balancer 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 and migrates chunks across the shards respecting the configured zones.
Once balancing finishes, the shards in the robot zone only contain
documents with client : robot, while shards in the fruitos zone only
contain documents with client : fruitos.
You can confirm the chunk distribution by running sh.status().