Sizing and Requirements

Data Model and Structure

1. What kind of data are you storing?

   • Are there relationships between data elements (e.g., one-to-many, many-to-many)?

2. What is the expected size and growth of your dataset?

   • Initial data size?

   • Growth rate (daily, weekly, monthly)?

3. What are the specific fields and data types you need to store?

   • Use cases for embedded documents vs. references?

4. How often are documents updated?

   • Are updates partial or full document replacements?

!!Access Patterns!!

5. What are your read and write patterns?

   • Read-to-write ratio?

   • Real-time data vs. batch processing?

6. What queries do you need to support?

   • Common query patterns and required indexes?

   • Do queries require aggregation, sorting, or joining of data?

7. How critical is query performance and what are the latency requirements?

   • Any Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place?

Scalability and Performance

8. What are your scalability requirements?

   • Expected number of transactions per second?

   • Peak usage times?

9. Do you need to support horizontal scaling (sharding)?

   • If yes, how will you choose a shard key?

10. What are your performance targets?

    • Metrics for acceptable performance (response times, throughput).

Consistency and Reliability

11. What level of consistency do you require?

    • Strong vs. eventual consistency?

12. What are your data durability and backup requirements?

    • Frequency of backups?

    • Point-in-time recovery needed?

13. Do you have specific replication and failover requirements?

    • Priority of replica sets members?

    • Read preferences settings?

Security and Compliance

14. What are your security requirements?

    • Authentication and authorization needs?

    • Encryption (at-rest, in-transit)?

15. Are there compliance requirements you must meet?

    • GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.?

Tooling and Infrastructure

16. What infrastructure are you using or planning to use?

    • On-premise, cloud, or hybrid?

17. What are your monitoring and logging requirements?

    • Tools for performance monitoring and alerting?

18. Are you planning to use any third-party integrations or services?

    • ETL tools, BI tools, etc.?

Development and Testing

19. What does your development and deployment pipeline look like?

    • How are changes managed and pushed to production?

20. What kind of testing will you conduct?

    • Load testing, integration testing, etc.