Thinking about CRUD has damaged your karma

I'm spending some time trying out MongoDB. Mongo is a NoSQL database that stores documents in a binary variant of JSON called BSON.

Mongo is often compared to CouchDB. But, aside from the fact that they both store JSON documents, their approaches are quite different.

Mongo stores documents in collections, which are vaguely like tables in a SQL database. Mongo queries are partial JSON documents matched against existing documents in the database. Couch builds views with map-reduce and is, in general, a little more conceptually heavy while Mongo is more straight forward with direct analogs to most SQL features.

One feature I like is the mongo console. It's a full javascript interpreter, which means you can easily script bulk updates and maintenance tasks.

The MongoDB site has a quickstart guide for popular OS's and a tutorial that will get you started using the console, as well as specific guides for loads of client languages.

You have not yet reached enlightenment...

From within Ruby, we can communicate with MongoDB with the mongo, bson and bson_ext gems. One fun way to learn about using MongoDB from Ruby is through the nicely kooky MongoDB_Koans, a series of unit tests with small omissions or bugs. You fix the bugs and make the tests pass, while the test harness gently urges "Please meditate on the following code...".