Collection database overview
In the Sitecore Experience Platform, the collection database (MongoDB) is a highly scalable database capable of collecting and storing vast amounts of customer experience data. In the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB), the collection database is the central repository for storing contact, interaction, history, and automation data.
The collection database can help you to increase the availability, scalability, and performance of your Sitecore implementation to handle billions of visits.
In the xDB, MongoDB is the default choice for the collection database because it is a highly scalable database solution. MongoDB is an open-source, NoSQL, document-oriented database, designed for ease of development and scaling.
The main benefits of using MongoDB with the xDB are to:
-
Handle billions of visits or interactions per year.
-
Provide scalability options to increase storage capacity.
-
Maintain high performance.
The collection database (MongoDB) collects and processes analytics data from all your websites. This data can include interactions, contacts, devices, location, automation data, and events that contacts trigger, such as goal conversions or campaigns.
MongoDB and NoSQL
MongoDB and other document-oriented database systems require you to think about databases in a slightly different way. Previously in Sitecore, all visitor analytics data was collected and stored in Microsoft SQL Server. This approach works well but, over time, extracting relevant data for reporting purposes becomes more and more time consuming and expensive, particularly when there are billions of visitors.
In SQL Server, it is possible to scale vertically (increasing the size of the server) but it is not so easy to scale horizontally (increasing the number of servers). So to achieve the required improvements in scalability, performance, and availability, a solution such as MongoDB is the appropriate choice.
Before you implement Sitecore with MongoDB as your collection database, see MongoDB considerations for guidance on MongoDB architecture and hardware configuration.