MongoDB Data Types – progrramers explained

Hello world! We have seen How to do CRUD operation in MongoDB earlier now it’s time to know what are data type which helps us create more efficient database using MongoDB. MongoDB supports more than 15 data types but more important is that what kind of data type is basically used to store the documents.

MongoDB uses bin­ary-en­coded seri­al­iz­a­tion of JSON-like doc­u­ments called BSON to store documents and make remote procedure calls. Like JSON, BSON sup­ports the em­bed­ding of doc­u­ments and ar­rays with­in oth­er doc­u­ments and ar­rays. BSON also con­tains ex­ten­sions that al­low rep­res­ent­a­tion of data types that are not part of the JSON specifications. Being more specific BSON is a binary format in which zero or more ordered key/value pairs are stored as a single entity. We call this entity a document.

Data type is an important part of Database. When you store the data in database with proper data type it reflects faster performance, therefore data type is important. For e.g. a number can be stored as an integer or string both but if we require numbers later for mathematical calculation then it is good to store the numerical value as integer to get faster mathematical calculations.

In MongoDB each BSON type has both integer and string identifiers as listed in the following table:

Type	Number	Alias	Notes
Double	1	“double”
String	2	“string”
Object	3	“object”
Array	4	“array”
Binary data	5	“binData”
Undefined	6	“undefined”	Deprecated.
ObjectId	7	“objectId”
Boolean	8	“bool”
Date	9	“date”
Null	10	“null”
Regular Expression	11	“regex”
DBPointer	12	“dbPointer”	Deprecated.
JavaScript	13	“javascript”
Symbol	14	“symbol”	Deprecated.
JavaScript (with scope)	15	“javascriptWithScope”
32-bit integer	16	“int”
Timestamp	17	“timestamp”
64-bit integer	18	“long”
Decimal128	19	“decimal”	New in version 3.4.
Min key	-1	“minKey”
Max key	127	“maxKey”

Some of the most important data types are explained below:

String

String data type is the most commonly used datatype to store the data. String in MongoDB must be UTF-8 valid. MongoDB $regex queries support UTF-8 in the regex string.

NumberDecimal

The decimal BSON data type uses the IEEE 754 decimal128 floating-point numbering format which supports 34 decimal digits (i.e. significant digits) and an exponent range of −6143 to +6144. Decimal 128 datatype is introduced in 3.4 version of MongoDB.

NumberLong (Integer)

The mongo shell treats all numbers as floating-point values by default. The mongo shell provides the NumberLong() wrapper to handle 64-bit integers.

NumberInt (Integer)

The mongo shell treats all numbers as floating-point values by default. The mongo shell provides the NumberInt() constructor to explicitly specify 32-bit integers.

Date

BSON Date is a 64-bit integer that represents the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch (Jan 1, 1970). This results in a representable date range of about 290 million years into the past and future.


Timestamp

BSON has a special timestamp type for internal MongoDB use and is not associated with the regular Date type. Timestamp values are a 64 bit value where the first 32 bits are a time_t value (seconds since the Unix epoch) and the second 32 bits are an incrementing ordinal for operations within a given second.

Within single mongod instance timestamp values are always unique.

Array

Arrays are the data type that can store single or multiple arrays or values within a single key.

Object

Objects are the data type that used for embedded documents

Object ID

ObjectIds are small unique ID that generated very fast and ordered. ObjectId values consist of 12 bytes, where the first four bytes are a timestamp that reflect the seconds since the Unix epoch, 5-byte random value, and last 3-byte counter, starting with a random value.

In MongoDB, each document stored in a collection requires a unique _id field that acts as a primary key. If an inserted document omits the _id field, the MongoDB driver automatically generates an ObjectId for the _id field.

MongoDB Tutorial : How to get lowercase hexadecimal string from MongoDB ObjectId() – Mongodb Objectid Operations.

Boolean

This data type is store Boolean values i.e. True or False.

Min/Max Keys

This type is used to compare a value against the lowest and highest BSON elements. The min and max keys indicate that the system should avoid normal query planning. Instead they construct an index scan where the index bounds are explicitly specified by the values given in min and max.

Null

This data type is used to store null data.

Binary data

This data type is used to store binary form of data.

Regular Expression

This data type is used to store regular expression.

Data Modeling in MongoDB

Unlike SQL databases, where you must determine and declare a table’s schema before inserting data, MongoDB’s collections, by default, does not require its documents to have the same schema. Data in MongoDB has a flexible schema documents in the same collection. They offer to create different fields, structure and data types in and common fields in same collection. This flexibility gives you data-modeling choices to match your application and its performance requirements.

MongoDB Data Types – progrramers explained