Breaking performance barriers with MongoDB

MongoDB?

• document-oriented storage
• free software - GNU AGPL v3.0 (DBMS), Apache (drivers)
• can store complex data structures
• stores data as JSON documents
• schemaless
• MongoDB company (professional support, training, ...)

> show dbs;
local	0.078125GB
> use drupal;
> show collections;
> db.awesomestuff.insert({"a":1, "b":2});
> db.awesomestuff.find();
{"_id":ObjectId("526965cd93259605e9afbc41"), "a":1, "b":2}
> show collections;
system.indexes
awesomestuff
> show dbs;
drupal 0.203125GB
local 0.078125GB
            

> db.awesomestuff.insert({
  "a": [1, 2, 3], "b":"some string"
});
> db.awesomestuff.insert({
  "a": [[1,2,4], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
});
> db.awesomestuff.insert({
  "a": {
    "name" : "Dries",
    "interests" : ["Drupal", "MongoDB"]
  }
);
            

What else?

• no joins
• no transactions (there are atomic update operations)
• allows you to index on anything
• seamless replication and scaling (sharding)
• capped collections
• geospatial indexes
• aggregation and MapReduce frameworks

persistent, easy to set-up, fast ("fire and forget"), automatic garbage collection

easy to set-up, fast ("fire and forget"), very good for multi-server envs, uses capped collections

easy to set-up, per-queue-collection

a bit funky :), stores blocks configuration, exposes UI

stores entites /w fields as Mongo docs, still needs base entity table, lazy destruction of stale data, new fields added very easily

{
  "_id" : 60549286,
  "_type" : "node",
  "_bundle" : "story",
  "_revision_id" : 150412786,
  "nid" : 60549286,
  "vid" : 150412786,
  "type" : "story",
  "language" : "und",
  "title" : "Hello world!",
  "uid" : 2044271,
  "status" : 1,
  "created" : 1364855903,
  "changed" : 1364855940,
  "comment" : 2,
  "promote" : 1,
  "sticky" : 0,
  "field_image" : {
    "fid" : 47928616,
    "width" : 594,
    "height" : 396,
    "alt" : "",
    "title" : ""
  },
  "body" : {
    "value" : "
MongoDB is great!
"
  },
  "field_tags" : [
    { "tid" : 14244596 },
    { "tid" : 14244596 }
  ]
}
            

Other stuff

• locking backend
• sessions storage
• Entity (field) query

Conclusion

• you cannot completely run away from MySQL (Yet! - Drupal 8!!)
• you can use mongo to achieve performance improvements
• Views can be used with EFQ query plugin
• you need to know why you're going to use MongoDB