Storing large data in Mongo using GridFS

A document size in MongoDB can be up to 16 MB. But does that mean we cannot store data more than 16 MB in size? There are cases where you prefer to store videos and audio files in database rather than in a filesystem for a number of advantages such as a few of them are storing metadata along with them, when accessing the file from an intermediate location, and replicating the contents for high availability if replication is enabled on the MongoDB server instances. GridFS can be used to address such use cases in MongoDB. We will also see how GridFS manages large content that exceeds 16 MB and analyzes the collections it uses for storing the content behind the scene. For test purpose, we will not use data exceeding 16 MB but something smaller to see GridFS in action.

Getting ready

Look at the recipe Installing single node MongoDB in Chapter 1, Installing and Starting the Server and start a single instance of Mongo. That is the only prerequisite for this...