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MongoDB Mastery: From Document Store to Distributed Database Engine

10-Phase Engineering & Kernel Architecture Curriculum

Target Audience: Principal Distributed Systems Architect, Database Reliability Engineer, Staff C++ Engineer
Depth: Cellular Anatomy, C++ Engine Source Internals, WiredTiger B-Trees, Hazard Pointers, Distributed Sharding, Raft-like Replica Set Consensus

Curriculum Syllabus & Study Roadmap

Phase Module Title File Link Focus Areas
Phase 1 Architecture, Evolution & Process Model phase_01_architecture_evolution_process_model.md Origin in 2007, MMAPv1 to WiredTiger, mongod process model, thread pools, WT cache allocation
Phase 2 BSON Cellular Anatomy & Schema Design phase_02_bson_schema_design_patterns.md BSON binary specification, type headers, ObjectId 12-byte layout, 16MB document limit, schema design anti-patterns
Phase 3 WiredTiger Storage Engine Internals phase_03_wiredtiger_storage_engine_cellular_anatomy.md B-Tree pages, In-memory vs On-disk layout, Hazard pointers, Checkpoints, Eviction server, WT journal write-ahead log
Phase 4 Indexing, SBE Query Planner & Pipeline phase_04_indexing_query_planner_aggregation.md B-tree index layout, Compound & Multikey indexes, SBE (Slot-Based Execution engine), Aggregation pipeline optimization
Phase 5 Transactions, Concurrency & MVCC phase_05_transactions_concurrency_locks.md Multi-document ACID transactions, Read/Write Concerns (w:majority, linearizable), WT MVCC update chains, Lock hierarchy
Phase 6 Replica Sets & Consensus Failover phase_06_replica_sets_consensus_failover.md Oplog circular collection, Election protocol v1 (Raft-like terms/epochs), Chained replication, Rollbacks (rollback/ directory)
Phase 7 Horizontal Sharding & Distributed Topologies phase_07_horizontal_sharding_distributed_topology.md mongos routing layer, Config Server Replica Set (CSRS), Range vs Hashed sharding, Chunk splits & online migrations, Two-phase commit
Phase 8 Security, Enterprise Auditing & Encryption phase_08_security_auditing_encryption.md SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication, Role-Based Access Control, FLE & Queryable Encryption (AEAD), WiredTiger at-rest AES encryption
Phase 9 Real-World Choke Points & Diagnostics phase_09_choke_points_capacity_diagnostics.md WiredTiger cache dirty page stalls, Oplog window depletion, Jumbo chunks, mongostat, mongotop, explain("executionStats")
Phase 10 The Sandbox Destruction Labs phase_10_destruction_labs_playbook.md Lab 1: Dirty cache saturation stall, Lab 2: Oplog exhaustion & stale replica failure, Lab 3: Shard chunk migration storm, Lab 4: Split-brain fencing

Companion Deep Dives & Revision Artifacts