Demystifying Data Modeling in MongoDB: A Step-by-Step Approach

Data modeling is the process of defining how data is stored and the relationships that exist among different entities in your data. The organization of data inside a database is referred to as a schema. When developing your schema, put more thoughts on your application than your database. A good data model makes data management easier, makes queries more efficient, uses less memory and CPU, and reduces costs. As such, data that is accessed together is stored together.

With data modeling, all data components of a system are identified, and their connections are determined, making it possible to come up with the best ways to represent the relationships between them.

Components of data models

There are four components of data modeling, namely:

• Entity: An entity refers to an independent object representative of a logical component in the system. Entities are either tangible or intangible. In MongoDB, each document is treated as an entity.
• Entity types: Entity types are used to group similar entities. For example, the entity type “movies” includes entities like “Fast and Furious.”
• Attributes: Attributes refer to the properties of an entity. For example, the “movie” entity may have attributes like a title.
• Relationships: Relationships define the connections between entities. They describe the relationships between entities.

MongoDB’s flexible schema should not be confused with its being schemeless. For this reason, you need data modeling or design schema. A solid data model will boost the performance of your application and make it more future-proof.

Ways to model relationships between entities

• One-to-one (1-1): One value is associated with only one document in this type. It implies that for every entity in a set, there is a corresponding and unique entity in the other set. This can also be interpreted as linking the primary key of one entity to the primary key of another, hence establishing a direct connection between the two entities.
• One to many (1-N): This type of relationship in data modeling implies that one entity is associated with multiple instances of another entity. One value can be associated with more than one document or value.
• Many to many (N-N): In this type of model, multiple documents can be associated with each other. For example, a movie can have multiple writers, but one can write different movies.

Flexible data modeling with Mingo

MongoDB’s flexible schema enables you to change your data's structure to suit your application's needs. However, it is best practice to envision data modeling before constructing the database. This is possible by evaluating your application's business requirements and structure.

Mingo allows you to model your data through the data relations feature. The data relations functionality can be unlocked by right-clicking the database and selecting it or clicking on it on the left-hand side of the Mingo application. Once opened, you can view all the relations between your collections. You also have the option to refresh your relations and remove all relations. The field path for the relations is also indicated, and you get to glimpse your data relations in one place.

There is also an “add a relation” functionality that allows you to edit the existing relations. This can be done by referencing collections, deleting, or managing all relations. That way, you can dictate the structure of your database with the Mingo GUI functionality. Through referencing, you can have separate collections for each entity and establish relationships between them using unique identifiers.

Mingo makes MongoDB easy to use, whether you are a software developer, database administrator, system administrator, DevOps engineer, or data scientist.  Try it with Mingo, the fastest MongoDB GUI that gets things done 65% faster.