What on earth is a schema???

Basically, a schema is a structure, plan, or pattern. In speaking of databases, the schema refers to the organization of the data into related tables (in the case of standard databases) or into collections in the case of NoSQL/Mongo databases.

So creating your schema means making the decisions on how you will organize your data to make it easy to store, find, and retrieve the parts as needed. In traditional databases, this planning needed to be done thoroughly and carefully to avoid problems later in the life of a project. With newer NoSQL databases it simplified considerably and is easier to change down the road. But there are many more possible choices for each situation. Either way, you still need to develop a basic concept to start with.

Dylan;

While MongoDB touts itself as schemaless, as others have said, there is much involved in designing a MongoDB schema that can greatly enhance or hinder your application's performance. So much so that MongoDB offers a training class in Advanced Schema Design that takes place over several days.

That being said, one of the important things to consider when designing your schema in MongoDB is how you plan on using the information you are storing. How big are you anticipating your collections and individual documents getting? Are you doing mostly reads from the data store, mostly reads to the data store? Do you have data that could/should be embedded in the documents or are document references a better choice?

I have found the documentation on the MongoDB site to be very helpful for much of these decisions, but it is still an "art form" to have great running database.

Post back if you have specific "how-to" questions. I'm sure there will be lots of help offered.

Happy coding,
Ken