Understanding Collections

MongoDB groups data together through the use of collections. A collection is simply a grouping of documents that have the same or similar purpose. A collection acts much like a table in a traditional SQL database. However, there is a major difference. In MongoDB, a collection is not enforced by a strict schema; instead, documents in a collection can have a slightly different structure from one another, if needed. This reduces the need to break items in a document into several different tables, as is often done in SQL implementations.