A document-oriented database is a designed for storing, retrieving, and managing document-oriented, or semi structured data. Document-oriented databases are one of the main categories of NoSQL databases. The central concept of a document-oriented database is the notion of a Document. While each document-oriented database implementation differs on the details of this definition, in general, they all assume documents encapsulate and encode data (or information) in some standard format(s) (or encoding(s)). Encodings in use include XML, YAML, JSON and BSON, as well as binary forms like PDF and Microsoft Office documents (MS Word, Excel, and so on).

I’d like to kick off this post with a thanks to the folks behind the PHP extension for MongoDB, who have done a fantastic job of matching the functionality of the Mongo shell client. This is important when you start to see how similarly the two function, and you might find that you can tweak your logic using the shell and quickly implement the same logic from within PHP.