Derick Rethans has a new post to his site today about MongoDB cursors in PHP when using the PHP driver and how it handles pulling data from the server.

Recently I was asked to improve the MongoCursor::batchSize documentation. This began an indepth investigation in how the PHP driver for MongoDB handles pulling data that's been queried from the MongoDB server. Here are my findings.

He talks about the cursor that's created when a "find" call is made and how you can add on additional options (via other methods on the cursor) to its execution. He also covers how you can set your own batch size, using limit to only fetch a certain number of results and combining the two to make for more memory efficient, yet complete, returned data sets.