Checking out MongoDB

Having experienced a lot of pain using RDBMSs ([1. Usually because of abusing RDBMSs, actually. Storing an object model in a RDBMS is not painful as long as the tooling is right – e.g. by leveraging the amazing NHibernate. The pain comes when developers suddenly start implementing overly complex queries and doing reporting on top of a pretty entity model, modeling stuff OO style… ouch!]) as a default choice of persistence, having read a couple of blog posts about MongoDB, and being generally interested in widening my horizon, I decided to check out MongoDB.

This post is a write-as-I-go summary of the information I have gathered from the following places:

More posts may follow…. 🙂

Getting MongoDB

Piece of cake! Download MongoDB from the download center and shove the binaries away somewhere on your machine. Default is for MongoDB to store its data in /data/db which translates to c:\data\db if you are using Windows – go ahead and create this directory. The MongoDB daemon can be started by running mongod.exe, which will accept connections on localhost:27017.

It will probably look something like the screenshot shown below.

An alternative data path can be specified on the command line, e.g. like so: mongod --dbpath c:\somewhere\else.

Accessing it with JavaScript

Run mongo.exe to start the Mongo Shell. It will probably look something like this:

In the MongoDB prompt, you can use JavaScript to access the db. Here’s a sample session of some commands I have found useful:

Now, I have successfully added two documents representing blog posts in a collection named posts. As you can see, MongoDB assigns some funky IDs to the documents.

That was a brief demonstration of the JavaScript API in the Mongo Shell. Now, let’s do this from C#.

Getting started with mongodb-csharp

Now, go to mongodb-csharp dowload section at GitHub and get a debug build of the driver. Create a C# project and reference the MongoDB.Driver assembly.

On my machine, punching in the following actually works:

Now, I can verify that the document is actually in there by going back to the console and doing this:

Nifty! Now lets show the posts from C#. On my machine the following snippet displays the headlines of all posts:

– which is documented in the following screenshot:

Random nuggets of information

Document IDs

All MongoDB documents must have an ID in the _id field, either assigned by you (any object can be used), or automatically by MongoDB. IDs generated by MongoDB are virtually globally unique, as they consist of the following: 4 bytes of timestamp, 3 bytes of machine identification, 2 bytes of process identification, 3 bytes of something that gets incremented.

As a nifty consequence, the time of creation can be extracted from auto-generated IDs.

The ID type used by MongoDB can be created with ObjectId('00112233445566778899aabb') (where the input must be a string representing 12 bytes in HEX).

How are documents stored?

I you have not yet figured it out, documents are serialized to JSON – with the minor modification that it’s a BINARY version of JSON, hence it’s called BSON.

String encoding

UTF-8. No worries.

What about references?

I will research this and do a separate post on the subject. As MongoDB is non-relational, a “join” is – in principle – an unknown concept. There’s a mechanism, however, that allows for consistent representation of foreign keys that may/may not give you some extra functionality (depending on the driver you are using).

What about querying?

I will research this as well, posting as I go.

OR/M? (or OD/M?)

It is not yet clear to me how to handle Object-Document Mapping. Will require some research as well. As an OO dude, I am especially interested in finding out what a schema-less persistance mechanism will do to my design.

What else?

More topics include applying indices, deleting/updating, atomicity, and more. Implies additional blog posts.

Conclusion

My first impression of MongoDB is really good. It’s extremely easy to get going, and the few error messages I have received were easy to understand.

I am especially in awe with how little friction I encountered – mostly because of the schema-less nature, but also because everything just worked right away.

4 thoughts on “Checking out MongoDB

    1. No I haven’t. I am actually unsure of how I would like to access my documents from C#.

      At one point, I thougt that wrapping documents behind something dynamic in C# 4 would be cool – sort of like using an ExpandoObject – but that would just be syntactic sugar on top of the document.

      I am thinking about doing something along the lines of: var personOrNull = document.As<IPerson>(), which would attempt to deserialize the fields required for the document to qualify as a complete person, yielding null if that could not be achieved – and var person = document.Is<IPerson>() to work pretty much like MongoDB.Emitter, allowing you to set fields that might not already be there.

      I am still pretty unsure of this though.

  1. There has been a lot of work going into the next version of MongoDB-CSharp which is soon to be released. Massive overhaul of the serializer now let’s us support typed collections (db.GetCollection() ). We’ll handle all the mapping. As a side benefit, the Linq provider was re-written and now supports projections, complex where conditions, and automatic map-reduce when groupby and/or aggregates are used.

    You can check out the pre-release branch at http://github.com/craiggwilson/mongodb-csharp and the accompanying wiki for some pre-release documentation.

    Have fun…

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