Posts tagged mongodb

How to integrate Mongoengine into Pylons

1 year ago

by Mike in Tech

Integrating Mongoengine into Pylons is really quick and painless if you know where to put stuff.

Add your DB settings to your development.ini file

mongodb.host = host[,replHost2] mongodb.port = port mongodb.db = db_name mongodb.username = uname mongodb.password = pass

Connect to MongoDB in config/environment.ini

At the top, include Mongoengine

from mongoengine import connect

And at the bottom, just before we return, include the following line:

# Connect with Mongoengine connect(config['mongodb.db'], host=config['mongodb.host'], port=int(config['mongodb.port']), username=config['mongodb.username'], password=config['mongodb.password'])

Add your models

Now we can create our models just like in the Mongoengine documentation.

Why your startup should be using MongoDB

1 year ago

by Mike in Entrepreneurship, Tech

Here's a hint. It isn't because it's better than (insert-your-brand-here)SQL. I'm not even going to address that debate right now. It simply has to do with product iteration.

I love MongoDB as a technology, but I'm not even going to argue this from a tech perspective. The point that I want to address here is pivoting. MongoDB scales, it shards, it map-reduces, yadda yadda yadda. I love it for those things, but for a seed-stage startup, it's single biggest asset is the fact that it is schema-less, and does it beautifully.

SQL is phenomenal for enforcing rigidity onto tightly defined problems. It's fast, mature, stable, and even a mediocre developer can JOIN their way out of a paper bag. Save it for your next government defense contract. Build your startup's tech on the assumption that your business premise will change, and that you need to be ready for it. Your data schema is a direct corollary with how you view your business' direction and tech goals. When you pivot, especially if it's a significant one, your data may no longer make sense in the context of that change. Give yourself room to breath. A schema-less data model is MUCH easier to adapt to rapidly changing requirements than a highly structured, rigidly enforced schema.

This advice applies equally to great solutions such as Cassandra, CouchDB, etc. Whatever your flavor is, make sure to give yourself options. Use the most powerful and flexible technologies available to you. If a startup decided to develop their core technologies in C, under the pretenses that "It will handle more traffic per server," I'd laugh in their faces. You won't get that traffic if another company comes along and can crank out better features, and ten times faster than you. Pre-optimization is at the heart of all software evil, and it applies to data design as well. Bring SQL back into rotation after you've found your market, and a specific project calls for it. When you're first searching for that market, use the most flexible tools you can. Use tools that let you move fast, and allow you to salvage as much work as you can from efforts that dead-ended or required a pivot.

mongodb sql startup

MongoDB Upstart service won’t start on Ubuntu (solved)

1 year ago

by Mike in Tech

Wow. Just spent wayyyy to much time chasing down an issue getting a MongoDB Upstart daemon up and running using mongodb-stable on Ubuntu 10.4. The short answer is that the DB daemon was uncleanly shut down at some point, and a lock file was lingering. That lock file prevented MongoDB from starting. The solution to this is relatively simple. The database needs to have a repair run on it, which will remove the lock file.

To run the repair:

mongod --repair

You may have to sudo that, depending upon your particular setup. More info about repair can be found here: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair

If you aren't able to repair because you need a config file specified as well, you're going to have to manually repair each DB on your box.

Forcibly remove the lock on your database: sudo rm /var/lib/mongodb/mongodb.lock
Open up the Mongo shell and run db.repairDatabase(); for each db.

The long issue: Why is it impossible for me to find any useful resources on Upstart, a component of the 10.4 LTS Ubuntu distro? I found absolutely nothing indicating where I could find Upstart logs, or something to help me narrow the search. Good grief.

Note: Thanks to Mike Dirolf for offering a safer solution than my first one. This post has been updated as a result of that.

mongodb ubuntu upstart

MongoDB now supports sharding

1 year ago

by Mike in Tech

Excuse my nerd freak-out, but this is really cool.

MongoDB is a great database system that combines a lot of the querying power with the flexibility and scalability of key-value stores. It's the DB I used in my Socialgraph system, and I fell in love with it really fast. It's incredibly easy to use, and requires much less rigidity than traditional SQL solutions.

I won't bore you with my extensive take one it, but suffice to say that I've used it before and absolutely love it. If you feel like SQL is slowing you down or holding you back, I'd really recommend giving MongoDB a trial.

The inclusion of production sharding in the MongoDB 1.6 release is big news because of the scalability that comes with it. If (fingers crossed) your product requires so much bandwidth that one server no longer cuts it, expansion is as simple as provisioning a new server, and letting MongoDB take care of the details. Goodbye app-level hacks and routing layers.

mongodb