Simple Script to test Sharding on MongoDB

Sharding, eh? There's so many questions on a daily basis about sharding -

• What is sharding?

• How do I do shard?

• When do I do shard?

• How do I know I need to shard?

• How many shards do I need?

• What shard key should I use?

• Can I change my shard key?
  

• What's a hotspot?

• How many shards do I need?
  

• Do I have a replica set within a shard?

• etc

 and everyone is unique with a different use-case so the answer isn't always the same.

Here's the official documents page (on sharding) and Kristina's blog, which is simply excellent on so many levels - I recommend reading both links (btw, it'll take a while :). Kristina uses some awesome analogies to explain sharding.

This blog post isn't about the technicalities of sharding, there are much more intelligent people than me who can explain that. I wrote a simple script to learn a bit more sharding and for reproducing issues and I thought I'd share it. It's written in bash because I didn't want to worry about dependencies :)

After you run the script, you should be able to run 

 $ mongo twitter --eval 'sh.status()'  

from your local shell and you should see something like the following indicating that you have now created a sharded cluster with a sharded database "twitter", a sharded collection "tweets"

 MongoDB shell version: 2.0.6  
 connecting to: twitter  
 --- Sharding Status ---  
  sharding version: { "_id" : 1, "version" : 3 }  
  shards:  
   { "_id" : "shard0000", "host" : "localhost:10000" }  
   { "_id" : "shard0001", "host" : "localhost:10001" }  
   { "_id" : "shard0002", "host" : "localhost:10002" }  
  databases:  
   { "_id" : "admin", "partitioned" : false, "primary" : "config" }  
   { "_id" : "twitter", "partitioned" : true, "primary" : "shard0000" }  
     twitter.tweets chunks:  
         shard0000  1  
       { "query" : { $minKey : 1 }, "max_id" : { $minKey : 1 } } -->> { "query" : { $maxKey : 1 }, "max_id" : { $maxKey : 1 } } on : shard0000 { "t" : 1000, "i" : 0 }  

Hopefully it's of interest or help to someone :)