There are stages to every engineer’s relationship with a database. They might go like this: shock: “what is this new thing? This is bad! I’m not used to this!” euphoria: “I CAN DO ALL THE THINGS” self-doubt: “but I thought I could do all the things?” the hero emerges: “I just need to tune this and that and use the right tool for the right use-case” Working with MongoDB isn’t an exception.

I originally wrote this post to appear on the FloQast Engineering Blog. I know how frustrating slow apps are. I also really care about my users’ time. One of the best ways to respect peoples’ time when using your applications is by ensuring your database is humming smoothly. I’ve learned how to work with MongoDB over the years in order to make sure my users’ time isn’t wasted and wanted to share some of those lessons here.

Code for tutorial available on Github Get Your Priorities Straight Chances are that if you’ve worked on the server side of things for long enough, you’ve probably run into a situation where you need a queue of some sort to handle messaging, processing, or any sort of orderly task execution. In this tutorial, we’ll be using a certain type of queue — the priority job queue — to help us solve a fairly common problem: payment processing.