MongoDB - Query embbeded documents - mongodb

I've a collection named Events. Each Eventdocument have a collection of Participants as embbeded documents.
Now is my question.. is there a way to query an Event and get all Participants thats ex. Age > 18?

When you query a collection in MongoDB, by default it returns the entire document which matches the query. You could slice it and retrieve a single subdocument if you want.
If all you want is the Participants who are older than 18, it would probably be best to do one of two things:
Store them in a subdocument inside of the event document called "Over18" or something. Insert them into that document (and possibly the other if you want) and then when you query the collection, you can instruct the database to only return the "Over18" subdocument. The downside to this is that you store your participants in two different subdocuments and you will have to figure out their age before inserting. This may or may not be feasible depending on your application. If you need to be able to check on arbitrary ages (i.e. sometimes its 18 but sometimes its 21 or 25, etc) then this will not work.
Query the collection and retreive the Participants subdocument and then filter it in your application code. Despite what some people may believe, this isnt terrible because you dont want your database to be doing too much work all the time. Offloading the computations to your application could actually benefit your database because it now can spend more time querying and less time filtering. It leads to better scalability in the long run.

Short answer: no. I tried to do the same a couple of months back, but mongoDB does not support it (at least in version <= 1.8). The same question has been asked in their Google Group for sure. You can either store the participants as a separate collection or get the whole documents and then filter them on the client. Far from ideal, I know. I'm still trying to figure out the best way around this limitation.

For future reference: This will be possible in MongoDB 2.2 using the new aggregation framework, by aggregating like this:
db.events.aggregate(
{ $unwind: '$participants' },
{ $match: {'age': {$gte: 18}}},
{ $project: {participants: 1}
)
This will return a list of n documents where n is the number of participants > 18 where each entry looks like this (note that the "participants" array field now holds a single entry instead):
{
_id: objectIdOfTheEvent,
participants: { firstName: 'only one', lastName: 'participant'}
}
It could probably even be flattened on the server to return a list of participants. See the officcial documentation for more information.

Related

MongoDb many to many with big relations

I've read a lot of documentation and examples here in Stackoverflow but I'm not really sure about my conclusions so this is why I'm askingfor help.
Imagine we have a collection Films and a collection Users and we want to know, which users have seen a film, and which films has seen an user.
One way to design this in MongoDb is:
User:
{
"name":"User1",
"films":[filmId1, filmId2, filmId3, filmId4] //ObjectIds from Films
}
Film:
{
"name": "The incredible MongoDb Developer",
"watched_by": [userId1, userId2, userId3] //ObjectsIds from User
}
Ok, this may work if the amount of users/films is low, but for example if we expect that one film will have a 800k users the size of the array will be near to: 800k * 12 bytes ~ 9.5MB which is nearly to the 16MB max for a BSON file.
In this case, there are other approach than the typical relational-world way that is create an intermediate collection for the relations?
Also I don't know if read and parse a JSON about 10MB will have a better performance in comparison with the classic relational way.
Thank you
For films, if you include the viewers, you might eventually hit the 16MB size limit of BSON documents, as you correctly stated.
Putting the films a user has seen into an array is a viable way, depending on your use cases. Especially if you want to have relations with attributes (say date and place of viewing), doing updates and statistical analysis becomes less performant (you would need to $unwind your docs first, subsequent $matches become more costly and whatnot).
If your relations have or may have attributes, I'd go with what you describe as the classical relational way, since it answers your most likely use cases as good as embedding and allow for higher performance from my experience:
Given a collection with a structure like
{
_id: someObjectId,
date: ISODate("2016-05-05T03:42:00Z"),
movie: "nameOfMovie",
user: "username"
}
You have everything at hand to answer the following sample questions easily:
For a given user, which movies has he seen in the last 3 month, in descending order of date?
db.views.aggregate([
{$match:{user:userName, date:{$gte:threeMonthAgo}}},
{$sort:{date:-1}},
{$group:{_id:"$user",viewed:{$push:{movie:"$movie",date:"$date"}}}}
])
or, if you are ok with an iterator, even easier with:
db.views.find({user:username, date:{$get:threeMonthAgo}}).sort({date:-1})
For a given movie, how many users have seen it on May 30th this year?
db.views.aggregate([
{$match:{
movie:movieName,
date{
$gte:ISODate("2016-05-30T00:00:00"),
$lt:ISODate("2016-05-31T00:00:00")}
}},
{$group:{
_id: "$movie",
views: {$sum:1}
}}
])
The reason why I use an aggregation here instead of a .count() on the result is SERVER-3645
For a given movie, show all users which have seen it.
db.views.find({movie:movieName},{_id:0,user:1})
There is a thing to note: Since we used the usernames and movie names, respectively, we do not need a JOIN (or something similar), which should give us good performance. Plus we do not have to do rather costly update operations when adding entries. Instead of an update, we simply insert the data.

custom sort for a mongodb collection in meteor

I have this collection of products and i want to display a top 10 products based on a custom sort function
[{ _id: 1, title, tags:['a'], createdAt:ISODate("2016-01-28T00:00:00Z") } ,
{ _id: 2, title, tags:['d','a','e'], createdAt:ISODate("2016-01-24T00:00:00Z") }]
What i want to do is to sort it based on a "magic score" that can be calculated. For example, based on this formula: tag_count*5 - number_of_days_since_it_was_created.
If the first one is 1 day old, this makes the score:
[{_id:1 , score: 4}, {_id:2, score: 10}]
I have a few ideas on how i can achieve this, but i'm not sure how good they are, especially since i'm new to both mongo and meteor:
start an observer (Meteor.observe) and every time a document is
modified (or a new one created), recalculate the score and update it
on the collection itself. If i do this, i could just use $orderBy
where i need it.
after some reading i discovered that mongo aggregate or map_reduce
could help me achieve the same result, but as far as i found out,
meteor doesn't support it directly
sort the collection on the client side as an array, but using this
method i'm not sure how it will behave with pagination (considering that i subscribe to a limited number of documents)
Thank you for any information you can share with me!
Literal function sorting is just being implemented in meteor, so you should be able to do something like
Products.find({}, {sort: scoreComparator});
in an upcoming release.
You can use the transform property when creating collection. In this transform, store the magic operation as a function.
score=function(){
// return some score
};
transformer=function(product){
product.score=score;
// one could also use prototypal inheritance
};
Products=new Meteor.Collection('products',{transform:transformer});
Unfortunately, you cannot yet use the sort operator on virtual fields, because minimongo does not support it.
So the ultimate fall-back as you mentioned while nor the virtual field sorting nor the literate function sorting are supported in minimongo is client side sorting :
// Later, within some template
scoreComparator=function(prd1,prd2){
return prd1.score()-prd2.score();
}
Template.myTemplate.helpers({
products:function(){
return Products.find().fetch().sort(scoreComparator);
}
});
i'm not sure how it will behave with pagination (considering that i subscribe to a limited number of documents)
EDIT : the score will be computed among the subscribed documents, indeed.

mongodb mapreduce groupby twice

I am new to mongodb and try to count how many distinct login users per day from existing collection. The data in collection looks like following
[{
_id: xxxxxx,
properties: {
uuid: '4b5b5c2e208811e3b5a722000a97015e',
time: ISODate("2014-12-13T00:00:00Z"),
type: 'login'
}
}]
Due to my limited knowledge, what I figure out so far is group by day first, output the data to a tmp collection and use this tmp collection to do anther map reduce and output the result to a final collection. This solution will get my collections bigger which I do not really like it. Does anyone can help me out or any good/more complex tutorials that I can follow? thanks
Rather than a map reduce, I would suggest an Aggregation. You can think of an aggregation as somewhat like a linux pipe, in that you can pass the results of one operation to the next. With this strategy, you can perform 2 consecutive groups and never have to write anything to the database.
Take a look at this question for more details on the specifics.

Should I use the timestamp in "_id"?

I need monitor the time of the records been created, for further query and modify.
first thing flashed in my mind is give the document a "createDateTime" field, with the default value of "new Date()", but Mongodb said the document _id has a timestamp embedded with, and the id was generated when the document was created, so it sounds dummy to add a new field for that.
for too many times, I've seen people set a "createDateTime" for their data, and I don't know if they know about the details of mongodb's _id.
I want know should I use the _id as a "createDateTime" field? what is the best practice?
and the pros and cons.
thanks for any tips.
I'd actually say it depends on how you want to use the date.
For example, it's not actionable using the aggregation framework Date operators.
This will fail for example:
db.test.aggregate( { $group : { _id: { $year: "$_id" } } })
The following error occurs:
"errmsg" : "exception: can't convert from BSON type OID to Date"
(The date cannot be extracted from the ObjectId.)
So, operations that are normally simple date operations become much more complex if you wanted to do any sort of date math in an aggregation. It would be far easier to have a createDateTime stamp. Counting the number of documents created in a particular year and month would be simple using aggregation with a distinct createdDateTime field.
You can sort on an ObjectId, to some degree. The remaining 8 bytes of the ObjectId aren't sortable in a meaningful way. Most MongoDB drivers default to creating the ObjectId within the driver and not on the database. So, if you've got multiple clients (like web servers for example) creating new documents (and new ObjectIds), the time stamps will only be as accurate as the various servers.
Also, depending the precision you'd need, an ISODate value is stored using 8 bytes, rather than the 4 used in an ObjectId.
Yes, you should. There is no reason not to do, besides the human readability while directly looking into the database. See also here and here.
If you want to use the aggregation framework to group by the date within _id, this is not possible yet as WiredPrairie correctly said. There is an open jira ticket for that, you might watch. But of course you can do this with Map-Reduce and ObjectID.getTimestamp(). An example for that can be found here.

Aggregate and Sum Data from mutliple MongoDB Collections filtered by date range

I have data across three collections and need to produce a data set which aggregates data from these collections, and filters by a date range.
The collections are:
db.games
{
_id : ObjectId,
startTime : MongoDateTime
}
db.entries
{
player_id : ObjectId, // refers to db.players['_id']
game_id : ObjectId // refers to db.games['_id']
}
db.players
{
_id : ObjectId,
screen_name,
email
}
I want to return a collection which is number of entries by player for games within a specified range. Where the output should look like:
output
{
player_id,
screen_name,
email,
sum_entries
}
I think I need to start by creating a collection of games within the date range, combined with all the entries and then aggregate over count of entries, and finally output collection with the player data, it's seems a lot of steps and I'm not sure how to go about this.
The reason why you have these problems is because you try to use MongoDB like a relational database, not like a document-oriented database. Normalizing your data over many collections is often counter-productive, because MongoDB can not perform any JOIN-operations. MongoDB works much better when you have nested documents which embed other objects in arrays instead of referencing them. A better way to organize that data in MongoDB would be to either have each game have an array of players which took part in it or to have an array in each player with the games they took part in. It's also not necessarily a mistake to have some redundant additional data in these arrays, like the names and not just the ID's.
But now you have the problem, so let's see how we can deal with it.
As I said, MongoDB doesn't do JOINs. There is no way to access data from more than one collection at a time.
One thing you can do is solving the problem programmatically. Create a program which fetches all players, then all entries for each player, and then the games referenced by the entries where startTimematches.
Another thing you could try is MapReduce. MapReduce can be used to append results to another collection. You could try to use one MapReduce job for each of the relevant collections into one and then query the resulting collection.