Business Intelligence Best Practices

Business Intelligence (BI) tools/applications that provide support for MongoDB should conform to the following Best Practices for certification against MongoDB Enterprise.

Download the best practices checklist and submit it with your application to expedite the certification process.

Please note that all certification categories require compliance with security best practices.

Connections

• Application should connect to MongoDB deployments using the standard connection string URI format. Application should support the ability to connect to (i) an individual mongod process, (ii) a MongoDB replica set (using auto-discovery), or (iii) a mongos as a frontend to a sharded cluster. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/connection-string/
• Upon connection construction application should expose all possible MongoDB Read Preferences to the end user. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/read-preference/
• Application should function as expected when authenticating as a user with read-only roles/permissions. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/user-privileges/#read

Modeling

• Application should provide users the ability to easily map JSON elements within documents to downstream data structures. Specifically, application should support the ability to unwind simple arrays or represent embedded documents using appropriate data relationships (e.g. one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many). For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/data-model-design/ and http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/data-models-relationships/
• Application should infer schema information by examining a subset of documents within target collections.
• Application should allow users to add fields to discovered data model that may not have been present within the subset of documents used for schema inference.

Queries

• Application should infer information about existing indexes for collections to be queried. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/list-indexes/
• Application should prompt and/or warn users of queries that do not contain any indexed fields. Note: simple field matching is appropriate, there is no need to execute a query explain plan in the background. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/query-optimization/#query-optimization
• Application should support the ability to return a subset of fields from documents using query projections. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/project-fields-from-query-results/
• For queries against MongoDB Replica Sets, application should support the ability to specify custom MongoDB Read Preferences for individual query operations. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/read-preference/
• Application should infer information about sharded cluster deployments and note the shard key fields for each sharded collection. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/method/sh.status/
• For queries against MongoDB Sharded Clusters, application should strongly warn the user against queries that do not use proper query isolation. Broadcast queries in a sharded cluster can have a negative impact on database performance. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/sharding-shard-key/#querying

Aggregations

Applications that incorporate data aggregation as part of downstream data usage should leverage the MongoDB Aggregation Framework, where possible. For more information, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/aggregation-pipeline/