Mongo Ruby Driver, Mongoid and MongoMapper

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Update Aug. 2010

On “Whyday”:http://whyday.org, I created a live demo of the examples, “that is running on Heroku”:http://mongodb-examples.heroku.com/.

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I am constantly looking around for different storage mechanisms on Heroku that can be used for caching 3rd party data. A recent update of their platform offered an MongoDB addon to access the MongoHQ service that drew my attention, so I started to evaluate this noSQL document database…

h2. MongoDB on OS X

It’s always a good starting point to have a local installation of a technology, here is how you get it running on your Mac with Homebrew:

brew install mongodb
# create a place for MongoDB to store the data
mkdir -p /data/db
# run server with default config (adapt to the right version)
mongod run --config /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.4.4-x86_64/mongod.conf

Using MongoHQ requires a user-authentication, so it’s nice to have the same credentials on your local MongoDB instance:

# start the client
mongo
> use test
> db.addUser("test", "test")

h2. evaluating different APIs

A very basic approach, that basically wraps the MongoDB API into Ruby code is the Mongo Ruby Driver, but there are two higher level APIs close to ActiveRecord called Mongoid and MongoMapper.

h3. Mongo Ruby Driver

It’s pretty easy to connect to your MongoDB with the right connection string:

conn = Mongo::Connection.from_uri("mongodb://user:pass@host:port/db")
db = conn.db("db")

The Mongo Ruby Driver is very simple and close to the MongoDB API:

coll = db.collection('test')
coll.insert('a' => 1)
coll.find().each { |row| p row }

h3. MongoMapper

MongoMapper can also be accessed with a connection string:

Mongo::Connection.from_uri(MONGO_URL)

Instead of using ActiveRecord::Base MongoMapper provides the MongoMapper::Document module to handle the object document mapping. Since the structure of a document in MongoDB is open and not static like in a SQL database, you have to define the structure in code, so MongoMapper knows how to map the document to your Ruby objects:

class Person
  include MongoMapper::Document

  key :name, String
  key :age, Integer
  key :born_at, Time
  key :active, Boolean
  key :fav_colors, Array

  connection Mongo::Connection.from_uri(MONGO_URL)
  set_database_name 'basement'
end

person = Person.create({
  :name => 'Nunemaker',
  :age => 27,
  :born_at => Time.mktime(1981, 11, 25, 2, 30),
  :active => true,
  :fav_colors => %w(red green blue)
})

person.save

Person.all.each do |p|
  ...
end

h3. Mongoid

Configuring Mongoid is somewhat different but easy:

Mongoid.database = Mongo::Connection.new(host, port).db(db)
Mongoid.database.authenticate(user, pass)

The DSL for defining Mongoid Documents is similar to MongoMapper and works mostly the same way. Querying the database is also similar to the API provided by ActiveRecord:

class Tweeter 
  include Mongoid::Document 
  field :user 
  embeds_many :tweets 
end 

class Tweet 
  include Mongoid::Document 
  field :status, :type => String 

  embedded_in :tweeter, :inverse_of => :tweets 
end

tweet = Tweet.new(:status => "This is a tweet!") 
tweet.tweeter = Tweeter.new(:user => 'ted') 
tweet.save

Tweeter.all.each do |tweeter| 
  ...
end

You can get the complete code and some more links from the GitHub project created for testing.

MongoDB is a great way to store document focused data and it’s simple to use with these great libraries!