Exploring MongoDB

Research

MongoDB is a NoSQL document database. A NoSQL document database stores information in a JSON format instead of rows and columns, which is one of the benefits over SQL databases as it makes it easier to expand the scalablity of the database as data grows. However, it is not impossible to increase the scalabillity of SQL databases and there are ways around this, but scaling a SQL database may not be the easiest solution.

The structure of MongoDB is where PostgreSQL will have a traditional table with rows and columns, MongoDB has collections instead of tables, documents instead of rows, and fields instead of columns.

What really interests me with MongoDB is this idea of adapting how data in stored as you go along, for example, if you had a blog post app you could have a row with details of the post, then if someone replies to that post then you can add fields as are necessary.

My resources

https://www.mongodb.com/

Getting coding…

To begin with I needed to understand how the query searches work, so I created a free account with MongoDB atlas,and followed this tutorial https://www.mongodb.com/developer/languages/javascript/node-crud-tutorial/ which helped me to understand how to link node.js with the database and to perform crud operations.

What I found particularly useful is that you can check the link to MongoDB by calling all databases because when I have used PostgreSQL I am reliant on Postman to determine if I have linked to the database.

import { MongoClient } from "mongodb";
import dotenv from "dotenv";
dotenv.config()

async function main() {

    const uri = process.env.ATLAS;

    const client = new MongoClient(uri);

    try { 
        await client.connect();
        await listDatabases(client)
    } catch (e) {
        console.error(e);
    } finally {
        await client.close();
    }
}

main().catch(console.error);

async function listDatabases(client) {
    const databasesList = await client.db().admin().listDatabases();
    console.log("Databases: ");
    databasesList.databases.forEach(db => {
        console.log(`- ${db.name}`);
    })
}

Next Steps

Now it’s time to get my hands on my own code. While there are plenty of tutorials out there, I find the best way to really learn is to roll up my sleeves and play with the code. What I will do next is to set up my own data, and perform CRUD operations to create a backend using node.js and then display the data in the front end using reactjs.