Using MongoDB should, for the most part, be as transparent as possible to the developer. Since there are no schemas, there is no need for migrations, and generally, developers find themselves spending less time on administrative tasks in the database world.

That said, there are several tasks that an experienced MongoDB developer or architect can perform to keep up the speed and performance of MongoDB.

Administration is generally performed in three different levels, ranging from more generic to more specific: process, collection, and index.

At the process level, there is the shutDown command to shut down the MongoDB server.

At the database level, we have the following commands:

• dropDatabase
• listCollections
• copyDB or clone to clone a remote database locally
• repairDatabase for when our database is not in a consistent state due to an unclean shutdown

In comparison, at the collection level, the following commands are used:

• drop: To drop a collection
• create: To create a collection
• renameCollection: To rename a collection
• cloneCollection: To clone a remote collection to our local DB
• cloneCollectionAsCapped: To clone a collection into a new capped collection
• convertToCapped: To convert a collection to a capped one

At the index level, we can use the following commands:

• createIndexes
• listIndexes
• dropIndexes
• reIndex

We will also go through a few other commands that are more important from an administration standpoint.