title: How to release Mongo DB in production environment?
body: <p>I've been playing around with Mongo DB recently in my spare time (for work I normally use relational DBs, or more recently RDF triple stores) and I have a question that has been bothering me. When you have developed an application that uses Mongo DB and it now needs to be deployed in the production environment, what is the recommended process for releasing the database?</p>
  
  <p>To be clear, I'm not talking about simply deploying an existing database on a server, I'm more interested in how to initially create a database in a state that is usable for the application.</p>
  
  <p>So for example, with an SQL database you might have a set of scripts that create the database, create all the required tables, initialise the tables with any required data, set up access rights, views, etc.</p>
  
  <p>What is bothering me is that with Mongo if the database, tables etc don't exist when you query them then they are created automatically. However I'm aware that it's possible to write Mongo scripts in JS to perform sequences of Mongo commands.</p>
  
  <p>So in short, I guess the question is do you need to go to the trouble of writing these setup and initialisation scripts, or is it simply a case of installing Mongo and pointing your application to it?</p>