MongoDB Tutorial - 2 - Documents vs Collections

We'll be using Documents and Collections throughout this course. So its important that you have a clear understanding of what the differences are.

A document is defined as a record in a mongodb collection and the basic unit of data in mongoDB. Documents look like JSON objects but they exist as BSON.

Here's an example of a Document that stores some data for an article. You can tell its stored using BSON because there's quotation marks around both the key/value pairs.

A collection is a grouping of mongoDB documents. Typically, all documents in a collection have a similar or related purpose.

And here is an example of a collection. In this collection, we are storing 2 documents. And each document has some data about an article.