As mentioned previously, I like getting my little gamification rewards and I have been meaning to add new content here for quite some time. In order to kill two birds with one stone, I took a couple of my ideas and turned them into the Q&A format that is encouraged on StackOverflow and the DBA StackExchange site. Hence we now have these two new questions (and answers): How to Programmatically Pre-Split a GUID Based Shard Key with MongoDB How to Determine Chunk Distribution (data and number of docs) in a Sharded MongoDB Cluster?