Are you new to MongoDB? Curious to see what’s interesting about it? Document-oriented databases like MongoDB are vastly different from relational databases in that they don’t store data in tables; instead, they store it in the form of documents. From a developer’s perspective, document-oriented (or schemaless) data is simpler and far more flexible to manage than relational data. Rather than storing data into a rigid schema of tables, rows, and columns, joined by relationships, documents are written individually, containing whatever data they require.

Among open source, document-oriented databases, MongoDB is often billed as a NoSQL database with RDBMS features. One example of this is MongoDB’s support for dynamic queries that don’t require predefined MapReduce functions. MongoDB also comes with an interactive shell that makes accessing its datastore refreshingly easy, and its out-of-the-box support for sharding and clustering (via replica sets) enables high scalability across multiple nodes.

Check out this IBM developerWorks’ Knowledge Path dubbed ”Discover MongoDB” – watch four videos, read a few articles, listen to a podcast and learn everything you need to know about MongoDB!