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Introducing flip-flop: a MongoDB Replica Set demonstration and experimentation service

By on 2013/04/30 in education, general

Greetings adventurers!

A lot of our users upgrade from single-node databases to replica set clusters without fully understanding how their driver, and therefore their application, will react to failover. In fact, we get so many questions about best practices with MongoDB replica sets that we thought it could be cool to host a replica set that anyone can connect to using their MongoDB driver of choice.

Today we invite you to check out flip-flop, a MongoDB Replica Set demonstration and experimentation service.  The flip-flop service consists of:

  • A live replica set that fails-over (i.e. “flips” and “flops”) every 60 seconds.  This cluster is always running and available to all at the following address: 
    mongodb://testdbuser:testdbpass@flip.mongolab.com:53117,flop.mongolab.com:54117/testdb
  • A set of example client scripts (currently just in Python) that simulate client interactions with the cluster that you can use as a starting point for your own experimentation

The flip-flop service is also great for those of you working on third-party drivers. Gustavo Niemeyer, author of mgo, a MongoDB driver for the Go language, told us flip-flop helped him find and quickly fix a small bug in the driver: “This is brilliant. I actually managed to find an edge case coding a trivial example against it due to the timing of the server re-election.” Pretty cool!

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[“Thinking”, “About”, “Arrays”, “In”, “MongoDB”]

By on 2013/04/18 in education, general, MongoDB

Greetings adventurers!

The growing popularity of MongoDB means more and more people are thinking about data in ways divergent from traditional relational models. For this reason alone, it’s exciting to experiment with new ways of modelling data. However, with additional flexibility comes the need to properly analyze the performance impact of data model decisions.

Embedding arrays in documents is a great example of this. MongoDB’s versatile array operators ($push/$pull, $addToSet, $elemMatch, etc.) offer the ability to manage data sets within documents. However, one must be careful. Data models that call for very large arrays, or arrays with high rates of modification, can often lead to performance problems.

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{ "comments": 8 }

How to use MongoDB on RedHat OpenShift with MongoLab

By on 2013/04/11 in education, MongoDB, partnerships

Hey RedHat fans – we’ve got your MongoDB hosting needs covered!

In today’s post we’ll be presenting a quick-start guide on how to connect OpenShift, the free RedHat auto-scaling Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), with our popular MongoDB Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), MongoLab.

For demonstration purposes, we’ll be using a Node.js application that we’ve written (available for download here). All it takes to connect your OpenShift application is five easy steps!

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{ "comments": 4 }

Weekend Project: Send sensor data from Arduino to MongoDB

By on 2013/03/29 in education, general, open source

mongolab-motion-layout

Arduino is an open-source electronics platform that can acknowledge and interact with its environment through a variety of sensor types.  It’s great for hardware prototyping and one-off projects.

I just got an Arduino Board from our friends at SendGrid, who also gave me a little tutorial in the art of Arduino hacking. Inspired by the tutorial and armed with this new  board, I bought a passive infared (PIR) motion sensor from my local Radio Shack. Now I was ready to play; in particular, I wanted to be able to collect that continuous stream of hardware sensor data into a MongoDB database for logging, trend analysis, system event correlation, etc.

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{ "comments": 1 }

Object Modeling in Node.js with Mongoose

By on 2013/03/11 in education, MongoDB, open source, partnerships

Check it out! We’ve just updated our Heroku Dev Center tutorial on object modeling in Node.js using Mongoose, a MongoDB ODM library. Mongoose gives your collections structure and simplifies Node’s callback patterns to make using MongoDB with Node.js even easier.

Learn more and download the sample Node.js app right here at the Heroku Dev Center.