Sharding

MongoDB supports large data sets via sharding, a method for distributing data across multiple database servers. Please refer to the MongoDB Documentation to learn how to set up a sharded cluster, its requirements and limitations.

Spring Data MongoDB uses the @Sharded annotation to identify entities stored in sharded collections as shown below.

@Document("users")
@Sharded(shardKey = { "country", "userId" }) (1)
public class User {

	@Id
	Long id;

	@Field("userid")
	String userId;

	String country;
}

1	The properties of the shard key get mapped to the actual field names.

Sharded Collections

Spring Data MongoDB does not auto set up sharding for collections nor indexes required for it. The snippet below shows how to do so using the MongoDB client API.

MongoDatabase adminDB = template.getMongoDbFactory()
    .getMongoDatabase("admin");                                     (1)

adminDB.runCommand(new Document("enableSharding", "db"));           (2)

Document shardCmd = new Document("shardCollection", "db.users")     (3)
	.append("key", new Document("country", 1).append("userid", 1)); (4)

adminDB.runCommand(shardCmd);

1	Sharding commands need to be run against the admin database.
2	Enable sharding for a specific database if necessary.
3	Shard a collection within the database having sharding enabled.
4	Specify the shard key. This example uses range based sharding.

Shard Key Handling

The shard key consists of a single or multiple properties that must exist in every document in the target collection. It is used to distribute documents across shards.

Adding the @Sharded annotation to an entity enables Spring Data MongoDB to apply best effort optimisations required for sharded scenarios. This means essentially adding required shard key information, if not already present, to replaceOne filter queries when upserting entities. This may require an additional server round trip to determine the actual value of the current shard key.

By setting @Sharded(immutableKey = true) Spring Data does not attempt to check if an entity shard key was changed.

Please see the MongoDB Documentation for further details. The following list contains which operations are eligible for shard key auto-inclusion:

(Reactive)CrudRepository.save(…)
(Reactive)CrudRepository.saveAll(…)
(Reactive)MongoTemplate.save(…)