Once every decade or so, a technology comes along that is so revolutionary that it fundamentally alters the way we approach everything we do. The world itself has changed. As I think back to 1995 when I first started developing Internet applications, our data needs were relatively simple. For the next 10 years, little changed; more and more people were using the Internet, and consequently data stores needed to scale to larger workloads, but caching largely took care of that, as all users were accessing the same set of data. As social media came to fruition, it was clear that the approach that had worked for the prior 30 years was not longer sufficient. In the future, all data and experience would need to be personalized—on a large scale. It was out of this need that MongoDB was created. A database for today’s applications, a database for today’s challenges, a database for today’s scale: MongoDB has that disruptive potential that will fundamentally change the way you approach developing applications.

I’d like to publicly thank my wife and four children for being patient with me as I spent most of my free time over the past few months writing this book.

What would happen if you optimized a data store for the operations application developers actually use? You’d arrive at MongoDB, the reliable document-oriented database. With this concise guide, you’ll learn how to build elegant database applications with MongoDB and PHP.

Written by the Chief Solutions Architect at 10gen—the company that develops and supports this open source database—this book takes you through MongoDB basics such as queries, read-write operations, and administration, and then dives into MapReduce, sharding, and other advanced topics. Get out of the relational database rut, and take advantage of a high-performing system optimized for operations and scale.

• Learn step-by-step the tools you need to build PHP applications with MongoDB
• Perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations, and learn how to perform queries to retrieve data
• Administer your database, and access and manipulate data with the MongoDB Shell
• Use functions to work with sets, arrays, and multiple documents to perform synchronous, asynchronous, and atomic operations
• Discover PHP’s community tools and libraries, and why they’re valuable
• Work with regular expressions, aggregation, MapReduce, replication, and sharding