MongoDB is often used in conjunction with big data pipelines because of its performance, flexibility, and lack of rigorous data schemas. This chapter will explore the big data landscape, and how MongoDB fits alongside message queuing, data warehousing, and extract, transform, load pipelines.

The topics that we will discuss in this chapter are as follows:

• What is big data?
• Message queuing systems
• Data warehousing
• A big data use case using Kafka, Spark on top of HDFS, and MongoDB