Slides for a talk I gave at the LA WebDev meetup on 02/23/2010.

1. Intro to MongoDB
Alex Sharp
twitter: @ajsharp
email: ajsharp@frothlogic.com
Monday, February 22, 2010

2. So what is MongoDB?
Monday, February 22, 2010

3. First and foremost...
Monday, February 22, 2010

4. IT’S THE NEW HOTNESS!!!
Monday, February 22, 2010

5. omgomgomg
SHINY OBJECTS
omgomgomg
Monday, February 22, 2010

6. MongoDB (from "humongous") is a
scalable, high-performance, open source,
schema-free, document-oriented
database.
- mongodb.org
Monday, February 22, 2010

7. Philosophy
Monday, February 22, 2010

8. Philosophy
“One size fits all” approach no longer applies
Monday, February 22, 2010

9. Philosophy
Non-relational DBs scale more easily, especially horizontally
Monday, February 22, 2010

10. Philosophy
Focus on speed, performance, flexibility and scalability
Monday, February 22, 2010

11. Philosophy
Not concerned with transactional stuff and relational
semantics
Monday, February 22, 2010

12. Philosophy
DBs should be an on-demand commodity, in a cloud-
like fashion
Monday, February 22, 2010

13. Philosophy
Mongo tries to achieve
the performance of
traditional key-value
stores while
maintaining
functionality of
traditional RDBMS
Monday, February 22, 2010

14. Features
Monday, February 22, 2010

15. Features
Standard database stuff
Monday, February 22, 2010

16. Features
Standard database stuff
Indexing
Monday, February 22, 2010

17. Features
Standard database stuff
Indexing
replication/failover support
Monday, February 22, 2010

18. Features: Document Storage
Documents are stored in BSON (binary JSON)
Monday, February 22, 2010

19. Features: Document Storage
BSON is a binary serialization of JSON-like objects
Monday, February 22, 2010

20. Features: Document Storage
This is extremely powerful, b/c it means mongo
understands JSON natively
Monday, February 22, 2010

21. Features: Document Storage
Any valid JSON can be easily imported and queried
Monday, February 22, 2010

22. Features
Schema-less; very flexible
Monday, February 22, 2010

23. Features
Schema-less; very flexible
no more blocking ALTER TABLE
Monday, February 22, 2010

24. Features
Auto-sharding (alpha)
Monday, February 22, 2010

25. Features
Makes for easy horizontal scaling
Monday, February 22, 2010

26. Features
Map/Reduce
Monday, February 22, 2010

27. Features
Very, very fast
Monday, February 22, 2010

28. Features
Super easy to install
Monday, February 22, 2010

29. Features
Strong with major languages
Monday, February 22, 2010

30. Features
Document-oriented = flexible
Monday, February 22, 2010

31. Features: Querying
Rich, javascript-based query syntax
Monday, February 22, 2010

32. Features: Querying
Rich, javascript-based query syntax
Allows us to deep, nested queries
Monday, February 22, 2010

33. Features: Querying
Rich, javascript-based query syntax
Allows us to do deep, nested queries
db.order.find( { shipping: { carrier: "usps" } } );
Monday, February 22, 2010

34. Features: Querying
Rich, javascript-based query syntax
Allows us to deep, nested queries
db.order.find( { shipping: { carrier: "usps" } } );
shipping is an embedded document (object)
Monday, February 22, 2010

35. Features: Binary Object Store
Efficient binary large object store via GridFS
Monday, February 22, 2010

36. Features: Binary Object Store
Efficient binary large object store via GridFS
i.e. store images, videos, anything
Monday, February 22, 2010

37. Concepts
Monday, February 22, 2010

38. Concepts: Document-oriented
Think of “documents” as database records
Monday, February 22, 2010

39. Concepts: Document-oriented
Think of “documents” as database records
Documents are basically just JSON objects that Mongo
stores in binary
Monday, February 22, 2010

40. Concepts: Document-oriented
Think of “collections” as database tables
Monday, February 22, 2010

41. Concept Mapping
RDBMS (mysql, postgres) MongoDB
Tables Collections
Monday, February 22, 2010

42. Concept Mapping
RDBMS (mysql, postgres) MongoDB
Tables Collections
Records/rows Documents/objects
Monday, February 22, 2010

43. Concept Mapping
RDBMS (mysql, postgres) MongoDB
Tables Collections
Records/rows Documents/objects
Queries return record(s) Queries return a cursor
Monday, February 22, 2010

44. Concept Mapping
RDBMS (mysql, postgres) MongoDB
Tables Collections
Records/rows Documents/objects
Queries return record(s) Queries return a cursor
Monday, February 22, 2010
???

45. Concepts: Cursors
Queries return “cursors” instead of collections
Monday, February 22, 2010

46. Concepts: Cursors
Queries return “cursors” instead of collections
A cursor allows you to iterate through the result set
Monday, February 22, 2010

47. Concepts: Cursors
Queries return “cursors” instead of collections
A cursor allows you to iterate through the result set
A big reason for this is performance
Monday, February 22, 2010

48. Concepts: Cursors
Queries return “cursors” instead of collections
A cursor allows you to iterate through the result set
A big reason for this is performance
Much more efficient than loading all objects into
memory
Monday, February 22, 2010

49. Concepts: Cursors
The find() function returns a cursor object
Monday, February 22, 2010

50. Concepts: Cursors
The find() function returns a cursor object
var cursor = db.logged_requests.find({ 'status_code' : 200 })
cursor.hasNext() // "true"
cursor.forEach(
function(item) {
print(tojson(item))
}
);
cursor.hasNext() // "false"
Monday, February 22, 2010

51. Cool Features
Monday, February 22, 2010

52. Cool Features
Capped collections
Monday, February 22, 2010

53. Cool Features
Capped collections
Fixed-sized, limited operation, auto-LRU age-out
collections
Monday, February 22, 2010

54. Cool Features
Capped collections
Fixed-sized, limited operation, auto-LRU age-out
collections
Fixed insertion order
Monday, February 22, 2010

55. Cool Features
Capped collections
Fixed-sized, limited operation, auto-LRU age-out
collections
Fixed insertion order
Super fast
Monday, February 22, 2010

56. Cool Features
Capped collections
Fixed-sized, limited operation, auto-LRU age-out
collections
Fixed insertion order
Super fast
Ideal for logging and caching
Monday, February 22, 2010

57. Cool Uses
Data Warehouse
Mongo understands JSON natively
Monday, February 22, 2010

58. Cool Uses
Data Warehouse
Mongo understands JSON natively
Very powerful for analysis
Monday, February 22, 2010

59. Cool Uses
Data Warehouse
Mongo understands JSON natively
Very powerful for analysis
Query a bunch of data from some web service
Monday, February 22, 2010

60. Cool Uses
Data Warehouse
Mongo understands JSON natively
Very powerful for analysis
Query a bunch of data from some web service
Import into mongo (mongoimport -f filename.json)
Monday, February 22, 2010

61. Cool Uses
Data Warehouse
Mongo understands JSON natively
Very powerful for analysis
Query a bunch of data from some web service
Import into mongo (mongoimport -f filename.json)
Analyze to your heart’s content
Monday, February 22, 2010

62. Cool Uses
Harmonyapp.com
Large rails app for building websites (kind of a CMS)
Monday, February 22, 2010

63. Cool Uses
Hardcore debugging
Spit out large amounts of data
Monday, February 22, 2010

64. Limitations
Transaction support
Monday, February 22, 2010

65. Limitations
Transaction support
Relational integrity
Monday, February 22, 2010

66. Resources
http://mongodb.org
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Tutorial
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Use+Cases
http://blog.mongodb.org/post/172254834/mongodb-
is-fantastic-for-logging
http://github.com/ajsharp/mongo-conf
Monday, February 22, 2010