How do I manage a sublist in Mongodb? - mongodb

Question

I have different types of data that would be difficult to model and scale with a relational database (e.g., a product type)
I'm interested in using Mongodb to solve this problem.
I am referencing the documentation at mongodb's website:
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/model-referenced-one-to-many-relationships-between-documents/
For the data type that I am storing, I need to also maintain a relational list of id's where this particular product is available (e.g., store location id's).
In their example regarding "one-to-many relationships with embedded documents", they have the following:
{
name: "O'Reilly Media",
founded: 1980,
location: "CA",
books: [12346789, 234567890, ...]
}
I am currently importing the data with a spreadsheet, and want to use a batchInsert.
To avoid duplicates, I assume that:
1) I need to do an ensure index on the ID, and ignore errors on the insert?
2) Do I then need to loop through all the ID's to insert a new related ID to the books?

Answer 1

Your question could possibly be defined a little better, but let's consider the case that you have rows in a spreadsheet or other source that are all de-normalized in some way. So in a JSON representation the rows would be something like this:
{
"publisher": "O'Reilly Media",
"founded": 1980,
"location": "CA",
"book": 12346789
},
{
"publisher": "O'Reilly Media",
"founded": 1980,
"location": "CA",
"book": 234567890
}
So in order to get those sort of row results into the structure you wanted, one way to do this would be using the "upsert" functionality of the .update() method:
So assuming you have some way of looping the input values and they are identified with some structure then an analog to this would be something like:
books.forEach(function(book) {
db.publishers.update(
{
"name": book.publisher
},
{
"$setOnInsert": {
"founded": book.founded,
"location": book.location,
},
"$addToSet": { "books": book.book }
},
{ "upsert": true }
);
})
This essentially simplified the code so that MongoDB is doing all of the data collection work for you. So where the "name" of the publisher is considered to be unique, what the statement does is first search for a document in the collection that matches the query condition given, as the "name".
In the case where that document is not found, then a new document is inserted. So either the database or driver will take care of creating the new _id value for this document and your "condition" is also automatically inserted to the new document since it was an implied value that should exist.
The usage of the $setOnInsert operator is to say that those fields will only be set when a new document is created. The final part uses $addToSet in order to "push" the book values that have not already been found into the "books" array (or set).
The reason for the separation is for when a document is actually found to exist with the specified "publisher" name. In this case, all of the fields under the $setOnInsert will be ignored as they should already be in the document. So only the $addToSet operation is processed and sent to the server in order to add the new entry to the "books" array (set) and where it does not already exist.
So that would be simplified logic compared to aggregating the new records in code before sending a new insert operation. However it is not very "batch" like as you are still performing some operation to the server for each row.
This is fixed in MongoDB version 2.6 and above as there is now the ability to do "batch" updates. So with a similar analog:
var batch = [];
books.forEach(function(book) {
batch.push({
"q": { "name": book.publisher },
"u": {
"$setOnInsert": {
"founded": book.founded,
"location": book.location,
},
"$addToSet": { "books": book.book }
},
"upsert": true
});
if ( ( batch.length % 500 ) == 0 ) {
db.runCommand( "update", "updates": batch );
batch = [];
}
});
db.runCommand( "update", "updates": batch );
So what is doing in setting up all of the constructed update statements into a single call to the server with a sensible size of operations sent in the batch, in this case once every 500 items processed. The actual limit is the BSON document maximum of 16MB so this can be altered appropriate to your data.
If your MongoDB version is lower than 2.6 then you either use the first form or do something similar to the second form using the existing batch insert functionality. But if you choose to insert then you need to do all the pre-aggregation work within your code.
All of the methods are of course supported with the PHP driver, so it is just a matter of adapting this to your actual code and which course you want to take.