Dec 7, 2017:

MongoDB setup and first impressions continued:

I waded through a few MongoDB setup runthroughs, but found these to be most useful: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/828392/Basics-of-MongoDB and https://docs.mongodb.com/getting-started/shell/installation/. Those sites have some good resources to what MongoDB is all about and why it’s relevant/useful compared to its peers.

Setup on MacOS 10 included downloading MongoDB Community (not Atlas!), unzipping it and giving it a home locally, creating /data/db for created databases to live, and editing PATH to include my newly created MongoDB home folder. After running Mongod and Mongo, I was in business.

First impressions and comparisons to SQL:

SQL’s Select and Where/Having seem to be replaced by a very flexible find() command that uses set-notation-like syntax. Instead of Selecting certain fields, though, we wind up getting each whole record(in SQL), aka a document in MongoDB (effectively a data object [like a JSON object]). SQL “Where” syntax was more succinct, but MongoDB set-like notation gives a comfortable and fairly clear way to provide search conditions.

SQL “From” loses some of its power (since you could pull from multiple relational databases) and is replaced by running “find” from just a single MongoDB database. However, it is very clean and clear what you’re doing/searching. (NOTE: this is just first impressions — there may yet be way to do “relational-like” searches in MongoDB). I’m very curious how it will handle summarizing data (e.g. summing up revenue data over a group of clients/members).

Onward.