Objective
Build a Student Progress Tracker to manage students, courses, and their grades — focusing on CRUD, indexing, transactions, aggregation, and full disaster recovery (backup, restore, PITR, and snapshots).
Database Design
The system revolves around three major collections — students, courses, and enrollments.
The students collection stores details such as student name, email, batch, and enrollment date.
The courses collection holds information about the course title, instructor, and credits.
The enrollments collection maps students to courses and tracks their grades and updates.
A one-to-many relationship exists between students and enrollments, and similarly between courses and enrollments. This structure demonstrates how MongoDB handles references and document linking in a normalized schema.
CRUD Operations
The project begins with implementing CRUD operations. You’ll insert new student and course records, retrieve lists of students in a given batch, update grades or contact details, and delete outdated course data. This stage solidifies the fundamentals of Create, Read, Update, and Delete within MongoDB using document-based collections.
Schema Validation
To ensure data consistency, JSON schema validation is introduced. For instance, the database enforces that every student must have a valid email and a batch value. This step demonstrates how MongoDB’s flexible schema can still maintain a level of structure and integrity.
Indexing and Query Optimization
Next, indexes are created on fields like email, student ID, and course ID to improve query performance. Compound indexes are introduced for queries that involve multiple filters, such as finding students in a particular batch with high grades. Students learn how indexing impacts performance and how to analyze query plans to verify optimization.
Aggregation Framework
Aggregation pipelines are then used to generate analytical insights. For example, the system computes the average grade per course or identifies the top-performing students per batch. This phase introduces grouping, lookup (joins), sorting, and projection, enabling deeper understanding of MongoDB’s analytics capabilities.
Transactions
To maintain atomicity, multi-document transactions are used when performing dependent operations — for example, enrolling a student in a course and updating their grade simultaneously. This demonstrates MongoDB’s ACID compliance in modern versions and how it ensures consistency across related collections.
Replication and High Availability
The system is then configured as a replica set with one primary and two secondary nodes. This setup provides redundancy and enables automatic failover if the primary node fails. By simulating node failures, learners understand how replication ensures high availability and fault tolerance.
Backup and Restore
Both logical and physical backups are explored. Logical backups use mongodump and mongorestore to export and import data, ensuring safe recovery in case of accidental data loss. The difference between full backups and incremental backups is discussed, along with storage considerations.
Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR)
This section introduces the concept of recovering data to a specific moment before a failure or mistake occurred. Using MongoDB’s oplog, learners understand how point-in-time recovery allows restoration to a precise state in the database’s history, minimizing data loss and meeting RPO (Recovery Point Objective) targets.
Snapshot Backup
The system also uses filesystem or volume-level snapshots for rapid recovery. Learners explore how snapshots differ from logical backups, why they are faster for large datasets, and how they fit into enterprise-level backup strategies.
Monitoring and Profiling
Finally, monitoring and profiling tools such as mongostat and mongotop are discussed to observe real-time database activity. MongoDB’s profiler helps identify slow queries, optimize performance, and detect potential bottlenecks.
API Structure
1. Student Management APIs
| Purpose | Endpoint | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create new student | /api/students | POST | Add a new student with name, email, batch, and enrollment date. |
| Get all students | /api/students | GET | Retrieve all students with optional filters (batch, date range, etc.). |
| Get single student | /api/students/{id} | GET | Fetch details of a specific student by ID. |
| Update student info | /api/students/{id} | PUT | Update student details such as email or batch. |
| Delete student | /api/students/{id} | DELETE | Remove a student record permanently. |
2. Course Management APIs
| Purpose | Endpoint | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create new course | /api/courses | POST | Add a new course with title, instructor, and credits. |
| Get all courses | /api/courses | GET | Retrieve a list of all courses. |
| Get specific course | /api/courses/{id} | GET | Fetch a course and its details by ID. |
| Update course info | /api/courses/{id} | PUT | Modify existing course details. |
| Delete course | /api/courses/{id} | DELETE | Remove a course entry. |
3. Enrollment & Grade APIs
| Purpose | Endpoint | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enroll a student | /api/enrollments | POST | Link a student to a course and assign an initial grade. |
| Get all enrollments | /api/enrollments | GET | Retrieve all enrollments with optional filters. |
| Get student’s enrollments | /api/students/{id}/enrollments | GET | List all courses a student is enrolled in. |
| Update grade | /api/enrollments/{id} | PUT | Modify the grade of a specific enrollment. |
| Delete enrollment | /api/enrollments/{id} | DELETE | Remove enrollment mapping. |
4. Analytics & Reporting APIs
| Purpose | Endpoint | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average grade per course | /api/reports/course-averages | GET | Generate report of average grades grouped by course. |
| Top students per batch | /api/reports/top-students | GET | Fetch students with highest GPA per batch. |
| Course performance trends | /api/reports/course-trends | GET | Show historical performance for each course. |
5. Backup & Restore (Admin Simulation APIs)
| Purpose | Endpoint | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trigger logical backup | /api/admin/backup | POST | Initiate a backup process (simulated through a system call or background task). |
| Restore from backup | /api/admin/restore | POST | Restore database from last backup location. |
| Snapshot creation | /api/admin/snapshot | POST | Simulate taking a snapshot of database state. |
| Point-in-time recovery | /api/admin/pitr | POST | Perform simulated PITR to a given timestamp. |
| Backup history | /api/admin/backup-history | GET | Retrieve list of previous backup timestamps. |
6. Monitoring & Health APIs
| Purpose | Endpoint | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Check replica set status | /api/admin/replica-status | GET | Show replica set health and primary/secondary nodes. |
| Monitor performance | /api/admin/performance | GET | Display metrics such as slow queries, index usage, and operation time. |
| Database health check | /api/health | GET | Returns OK if MongoDB connection is alive. |
By the end of this project, learners will have built a robust student tracking system that demonstrates MongoDB’s full potential — from CRUD to high availability and data durability. They gain a hands-on understanding of how to maintain performance, ensure consistency, and plan for data recovery in production environments.
Syed Jafer K 