In this chapter, we went on a journey through web, SQL, and NoSQL technologies from their inception to their current state. We identified how MongoDB has been shaping the world of NoSQL databases for the past years and how it is positioned against other SQL and NoSQL solutions.

We explored MongoDB's key characteristics and how MongoDB has been used in production deployments. We identified best practices for designing, deploying, and operating MongoDB.

Finally, we learned how to learn by going through documentation and online resources to stay up to date with latest features and developments.

In the next chapter, we will go deeper into schema design and data modeling and how to connect to MongoDB both using the official drivers and also using an Object Document Mapper (ODM), a variation of object-relational mappers for NoSQL databases.