We’ve got a file-based program we want to convert to use a document database, specifically MongoDB. Problem is, MongoDB is limited to 2GB on 32-bit machines (according to http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/FAQ#FAQ-Whatarethe32bitlimitations%3F), and a lot of our users will have over 2GB of data. Is there a way to have MongoDB use more than one file somehow?
I thought perhaps I could implement sharding on a single machine, meaning I’d run more than one mongod on the same machine and they’d somehow communicate. Could that work?
The only way to have more than 2GB on a single node is to run multiple mongod processes. So sharding is one option (like you said) or doing some manual partitioning across processes.