One more feature, among many, is MongoDB's ability to handle a massive amount of data. This is accomplished by splitting up a sizeable collection across multiple servers, creating a sharded cluster. In the process of splitting the collection, a shard key is chosen from among the fields present with the collection's documents. The shard key is then used by the sharded cluster balancer to determine the appropriate distribution of documents. Application program code is then able, by its knowledge of the value of the shard key, to direct queries to specific members of the sharded cluster, achieving potentially enormous performance gains. This setup is illustrated in the following diagram:
This topic is covered in extensive detail in Chapter 15, Deploying a Sharded Cluster. In the next section of this chapter, we have a look at the major differences between MongoDB 3 and MongoDB 4.x.
