Category Archives: Database

RSpec, Mongo and Database Cleaner

This is kinda obvious, once you see it… But I’d figure it might help someone, someday.

I wanted to create a document one time, so I put it in the before :all block.

Yet, in the “it should” block, the document was gone, spec failed.

If I changed to a before :each block, the spec passed

So I changed the spec_helper from doing a clean for each, to using truncation. I also switched to doing the clean to the before :suite block (so that data didn’t build up in Mongo):

spec/spec_helper.rb
config.before(:suite)do
  #DatabaseCleaner[:mongo_mapper].strategy = :truncation
  DatabaseCleaner.clean
end

config.before(:each) do
  DatabaseCleaner[:mongo_mapper].strategy = :truncation
  #DatabaseCleaner.clean
end

And now things are as I expected them to be when using a before :all block…

I can repeatedly run the specs, and they pass.

Anatomy of a MongoDB Profiling Session

This particular application has been collecting data for months now, but hasn’t really had any users by design. At 33GB of data, pulling up a list of messages received was taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r!

So I decided to document how to go about and fix a running production system… Hope it helps.

Log into mongo console and turn on profiling (the ‘1’) to monitor slow queries. I entered >10 seconds, which really stinks (!). You should adjust it to suit your app’s definition of “slow”—maybe 500ms:

> db.setProfilingLevel(1,10000)
{ "was" : 0, "slowms" : 100, "ok" : 1 }

Next I went back to the webapp and executed the page request that exhibits the slow response …

Once the page returns, go in and look for any slow responses that the profiler logged:

> db.system.profile.find()
{
  "ts" : ISODate("2012-02-18T15:34:02.967Z"), 
  "op" : "command", 
  "command" : { "count" : "messages", 
    "query" : { "_type" : "HL7Message", "recv_app" : "CAREGIVER" }, 
      "fields" : null }, 
  "ntoreturn" : 1, 
  "responseLength" : 48, 
  "millis" : 119051, 
  "client" : "192.168.100.67", 
  "user" : "" 
}
{
  "ts" : ISODate("2012-02-18T15:35:51.704Z"),
  "op" : "query", 
  "query" : { "_type" : "HL7Message", "recv_app" : "CAREGIVER" },
  "ntoreturn" : 25,
  "ntoskip" : 791025,
  "nscanned" : 791051,
  "nreturned" : 25,
  "responseLength" : 49956,
  "millis" : 108720,
  "client" : "192.168.100.67",
  "user" : "" 
}

You can see there was a count query and a query for the data itself (we are using pagination). Sure enough, look here:

  • “ntoreturn” : 25,
  • “nscanned” : 791051,

 

Wow, that’s nasty… to return 25 records, we scanned 791,051! Gulp. Looks like a full table scan. Never a good thing (unless you have very small amounts of data).

Let’s see what sorts of indexes exist for the messages collection:

db.system.indexes.find( { ns: "production-alerts.messages" } );
{ "name" : "_id_", "key" : { "_id" : 1 }, "v" : 0 }
{ "v" : 1, "key" : { "created_at" : -1 }, "name" : "created_at_-1" }
{ "v" : 1, "key" : { "_type" : 1 }, "name" : "_type_1" }
{ "v" : 1, "key" : { "recv_app" : 1 }, "name" : "recv_app_1" }
{ "v" : 1, "key" : { "created_at" : -1, "recv_app" : 1 }, "name" : "created_at_-1_recv_app_1" }
{ "v" : 1, "key" : { "message_type" : 1 }, "name" : "message_type_1" }
{ "v" : 1, "key" : { "trigger_event" : 1 }, "name" : "trigger_event_1" }

Well, as expected, there is no index covering the multiple keys that we are searching on. So let’s add a multi-key index to match the query used by the controller!

db.messages.ensureIndex({_type:1, recv_app:1});

Now the app FLIES!! We dropped from 100+ seconds to 1.5 seconds (look at the “millis”) w00t!

db.messages.find({ _type : "HL7Message", recv_app : "CAREGIVER"}).explain();
> db.messages.find({ _type : "HL7Message", recv_app : "CAREGIVER"}).explain();
{
	"cursor" : "BtreeCursor _type_1_recv_app_1",
	"nscanned" : 791153,
	"nscannedObjects" : 791153,
	"n" : 791153,
	"millis" : 1546,
	"nYields" : 0,
	"nChunkSkips" : 0,
	"isMultiKey" : false,
	"indexOnly" : false,
	"indexBounds" : {
		"_type" : [
			[
				"HL7Message",
				"HL7Message"
			]
		],
		"recv_app" : [
			[
				"CAREGIVER",
				"CAREGIVER"
			]
		]
	}
}

To prevent this sort of thing, you can consider adding indexes when you create new queries. But the best way to do this is to be empirical and know whether you should add the index through some testing. I’ll leave that for another day!

Exporting MongoMapper Objects to JSON

I wanted to export a MongoMapper document and it’s related documents as JSON — with embedded arrays for the collections. Invoking to_json did not seem to work perfectly, so I set about to discover what was going on.

Conclusion

If you use Embedded Documents for every associated document, the to_json method will work perfectly.

If you have normal Documents, you must override the as_json method to export the object “tree.”

Details

Here is a walk through of exporting mongo documents as JSON.

I created a simple Author class. And will use a simple test to show how to_json works:

describe "Author 1" do
  before :all do
    class Author
      include MongoMapper::Document
      key :name
      key :pen_name
    end
  end

  it "should output JSON" do
    p1 = Author.create(:name => "Ben Franklin", :pen_name => "Poor Richard")
    json = p1.to_json
    puts json
    json.should include "name"
    json.should include "Poor Richard"
  end
end

And we get what we expect:

{
  "books":[],
  "id":"4f316a4c8951a2eefe000001", 
  "name":"Ben Franklin",
  "pen_name":"Poor Richard"
}

Now let’s add a new Book document of the Embedded variety. Here we will assert that the Author JSON should include a list of Books:

describe "Author 2" do
  before :all do
    class Book
      include MongoMapper::EmbeddedDocument
      key :title
    end
    class Author
      include MongoMapper::Document
      many :books
    end
  end
  it "authors have books" do
    p1 = Author.create(:name => "Ben Franklin", :pen_name => "Poor Richard",
                       :books => [Book.new(:title => "Poor Richard's Almanac")])
    json = p1.to_json
    puts json
    json.should include "Poor Richard"
    json.should include "Almanac"
  end
end

And, sure enough, it works.

{
  "books":[{
    "id":"4f316a4c8951a2eefe000003", 
    "title":"Poor Richard's Almanac"}],
  "id":"4f316a4c8951a2eefe000004", 
  "name":"Ben Franklin", 
  "pen_name":"Poor Richard"
}

Let’s add a list of Interests to the Author class, this time as a normal document type (not embedded). Now we can test that the Author JSON has the expected Interest:

describe "Author 3" do
  before :all do
    class Interest
      include MongoMapper::Document
      key :title, String
    end
    class Book
      include MongoMapper::EmbeddedDocument
      key :title
    end
    class Author
      include MongoMapper::Document
      many :books
      many :interests
    end
  end
  it "should have interests" do
    p1 = Author.create(:name => "Ben Franklin", :pen_name => "Poor Richard",
                       :books => [Book.new(:title => "Poor Richard's Almanac")],
                       :interests => [Interest.create(:title => "Movies")])
    json = p1.to_json
    puts json
    json.should include "Poor Richard"
    json.should include "Almanac"
    json.should include "Movies" # Fails
  end
end

Whoa! No joy! Seems that the association to non-Embedded documents does not get automatically exported to the JSON.

{
  "books":[{
    "id":"4f316a4c8951a2eefe000006",
    "title":"Poor Richard's Almanac"}],
  "id":"4f316a4c8951a2eefe000007", 
  "name":"Ben Franklin", 
  "pen_name":"Poor Richard"
}

And we get a failed spec 🙁

# expected "{"books":[{"id":"4f316a4c8951a2eefe000006","title":"Poor Richard's Almanac"}],"id":"4f316a4c8951a2eefe000007","name":"Ben Franklin","pen_name":"Poor Richard"}" to include "Movies"

Turns out we can add a custom as_json implementation to the class that you want to export as JSON. The as_json is responsible for indicating which fields and collections should be included in the json.

describe "Author 4" do
  before :all do
    class Interest
      include MongoMapper::Document
      key :title, String

    end
    class Book
      include MongoMapper::EmbeddedDocument
      key :title
    end
    class Author
      include MongoMapper::Document
      many :books
      many :interests

      def as_json options={}
        {
            :name => self.name,
            :pen_name => self.pen_name,
            :books => self.books,
            :interests => self.interests
        }
      end
    end
  end
  it "should have interests in json" do
    p1 = Author.create(:name => "Ben Franklin", :pen_name => "Poor Richard",
                       :books => [Book.new(:title => "Poor Richard's Almanac")],
                       :interests => [Interest.create(:title => "Movies")])
    json = p1.to_json
    puts json
    json.should include "Poor Richard"
    json.should include "Almanac"
    json.should include "Movies"
  end
end

And we have Books and Interests. Success!

{
  "name":"Ben Franklin", 
  "pen_name":"Poor Richard",
  "books":[{
    "id":"4f31782a8951a2f267000002", 
    "title":"Poor Richard's Almanac"}], 
  "interests":[{
    "author_id":"4f31782a8951a2f267000003", 
    "id":"4f31782a8951a2f267000001",
    "title":"Movies"}]
}

 

Uncle Bob Challenges The Architecture of a Rails App

Uncle Bob has a very interesting keynote at the Ruby Midwest 2011 conference.

I developed apps with the fundamental architecture of the following (with dependencies only crossing one layer):

——
UI Layer
——
Business Object Layer
——
Data Mgt. Layer
——

Born from the one pattern that is king of the hill in my book: “Separation of Concerns.” The above was my architecture for all projects since the early 90s… C++, Java… but so far not so much in Rails.

I have thought about trying it, but not sure if it will pay off or not.

Essentially, it is about cleaving the rails model classes into two parts:

  1. Business Methods, attributes, business rules
  2. Persistence Methods, attributes, all knowledge of the DBMS details

In general, the UI deals with BOs, but sometimes we create dumb “Data Transfer Objects” that are lightweight versions of the business objects to be thrown about the system.

As a side note, in general, moving code to a more “object-oriented” state often ends up with the same lines of code. And often a bit more due to the boiler plate of creating additional classes.

In a current project, we have pulled out the business objects into a separate gem — but mostly because it needs to be used by our web app and by an eventmachine app.

The thing that shocked me the most about Rails, when Corey Haines introduced me to it in 2009, was that it was a lot like “Model Driven Architecture” that I had worked with for a few years. Given an architecture, a vertical slice thru the app, weave the model thru the architecture generator and out comes an application with a consistent architecture for the bulk of the app that is mostly the same (save for model/property names). Commercially, this MDA technology was a failure, last time I checked. Even though I thought it was the smartest way to develop apps, few others did. Except for Rails developers — largely because most rails devs probably have a very different mindset than other devs.

See blast from the past presentation here.

Though Bob pokes fun at Rails high-level directory structure as not revealing the business domain, I am totally fine with that. It’s a good thing. Yea, sure, it is revealing that it is an MVC style app designed to deliver web apps, so what? No matter which architecture is used, I look for the domain classes to tell me what the system is doing…

In my handful of rails apps to date, I have only used MongoDB and MongoMapper — and this is the closest I have gotten to the good old days of when I used the POET Object-oriented Database with C++ back in the late 90s. It is the closest I have been to nirvana. I basically *almost* don’t need to care that there even is a database…

One of these days, I’ll compare and contrast a Rails/MongoMapper app with and without Business Objects separated from Data Management classes.

MongoDB Group Map-Reduce Performance

I wanted to get some aggregated count data by message type for a collection with over 1,000,000 documents.

The model is more or less this (a lot removed for simplicity):

class MessageLog
  include MongoMapper::Document

  # Attributes ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
  # Message's internal timestamp / when it was sent
  key :time, Time
  # Message type
  key :event_type, String, :default => "Not Set"
  # The message ID
  key :control_id, String, :index => true

  # Add created_at, updated_at
  timestamps!

  # Indexes :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
  def self.create_indexes
    MessageLog.ensure_index([[:created_at,1]])
    MessageLog.ensure_index([[:event_type,1]])
  end
end

Distinct

Though I originally hard-coded the message types (as they do not change very often, and are meaningless without other code changes anyway), I figured I would test dynamically gathering the distinct types. MongoDb supports the distinct function. From the MongoDB console:

> db.message_logs.distinct("event_type")
[
	"Bed Order",
	"Cactus Update",
	"ED Release",
	"ED Summary",
	"Inpatient Admit",
	"Inpatient Discharge Summary",
	"Not Set",
	"Registration",
	"Registration Update",
	"Unknown Message Type"
]

Though I saw distinct in MongoMapper, I had trouble getting it to work (this is an older app on <v2.0, method missing error).

However, a very powerful technique within MongoMapper worked just perfect! Essentially, every collection in MongoMapper will return itself as a collection that MongoDB understands (in their db.collection.blah format) — helps when you need to execute MongoDB style commands:

class MessageLog
  # @return [Array] a list of unique types (strings)
  def self.event_types
    MessageLog.collection.distinct("event_type")
  end
end

Simple Count

I used a simple technique to iterate over each type and get the associated count:

class MessageLog
  # Perform a group aggregation by event type.
  #
  # @return [Hash] the number of message logs per event type.
  def self.count_by_type
    results = {}
    MessageLog.event_types.each {|type| results[type] = MessageLog.count(:event_type => type)}
    results
  end
end

Map-Reduce Too Slow

In this instance, it turned out that Map-Reduce was significantly slower, and I am not exactly sure why. Other than I suppose that iterating over each document is more expensive than calling count with a filter on the event_type key (which is covered by an index).

class MessageLog
  # Perform a group aggregation by event type.
  # Map-Reduce was slow by comparison (20 seconds vs 2.3 seconds)
  #
  # @return [Hash] the number of message logs per event type.
  def self.count_by_type_mr
    results = {}
    counts = MessageLog.collection.group( {:key => :event_type, :cond => {}, :reduce => 'function(doc,prev) { prev.count += 1; }', :initial => {:count => 0} })
    counts.each {|r| results[r["event_type"]] = r["count"]}
    results
  end
end

Performance Results

As you can see, Map-Reduce took about [notice]10 times longer,[/notice] ~21 seconds versus ~2.3 seconds.

And this is over 1,129,519 documents, so it is a non-trivial test, IMO.

> measure_mr = Benchmark.measure("count") { results = MessageLog.count_by_type_mr}
> measure = Benchmark.measure("count") { results = MessageLog.count_by_type }
ruby-1.8.7-p334 :010 > puts measure_mr
  0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 ( 20.794720)
> puts measure
  0.020000   0.000000   0.020000 (  2.340708)
> results.map {|k,v| puts "#{k} #{v}"}
Not Set                          1
Inpatient Admit              4,493
Unknown Message Type         1,292
Bed Order                    6,948
Registration Update        852,189
Registration               123,064
ED Summary                  94,933
Cactus Update               10,145
Inpatient Discharge Summary 18,150
ED Release                  18,304

 Summary

You may get better performance using simpler techniques for simple aggregate commands. And maybe Map-Reduce shines better on more complex computations/queries.

[important]But your best bet is to test it out with meaningful data samples.[/important]

MongoDB Index Performance

As part of this (unintended) mini-series on MongoDB and indexing, I had written a little test to see if I could document performance gains through indexing. I used realworld data, albeit only 50,000 records, to query out a handful or documents (24 being the most).

Related posts:

Here is the code:

require 'test_helper'

class EncounterListingTest < Test::Unit::TestCase

  context "Indexing" do
    ProfileStats2 = Struct.new(:doctor_num, :count, :timing1, :timing2, :timing3)

    should "profile assorted doctor patient retrievals" do
      stats = []
      doctor_nums = ["602490", "603324", "212043", "602938"]
      doctor_nums.each_with_index do |doctor_num, i|
        MongoMapper.database.collection('encounters').drop_indexes
        show_indexes if i == 0
        timing1 = (measure_performance(doctor_num) + measure_performance(doctor_num) + measure_performance(doctor_num))/3

        MongoMapper.database.collection('encounters').drop_indexes
        add_index([[:private_physician, 1]])
        show_indexes if i == 0
        timing2 = (measure_performance(doctor_num) + measure_performance(doctor_num) + measure_performance(doctor_num))/3

        MongoMapper.database.collection('encounters').drop_indexes
        add_index([[:private_physician,1], [:notify_physician,1], [:visible_count,1]])
        show_indexes if i == 0
        timing3 = (measure_performance(doctor_num) + measure_performance(doctor_num) + measure_performance(doctor_num))/3

        n_count = Encounter.count(:private_physician => doctor_num, :notify_physician => 'Y', :visible_count.gt => 0)
        stats << ProfileStats2.new(doctor_num, n_count, timing1, timing2, timing3)

      end

      File.open("test/performance/index_stats_results-#{Time.now.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")}.csv", 'w') do |f|
        puts "%10s  %6s  %5s  %5s  %5s" % ["doctor", "count", "None", "Phys", "Phys/Ntfy/Vis"]
        f.puts "doctor, count, None, Phys, PhysNtfyVis"
        stats.each do |s|
          results = "%10d, %6d, %5.3f, %5.3f, %5.3f" % [s.doctor_num, s.count, s.timing1, s.timing2, s.timing3]
          puts results
          f.puts "%d, %d, %5.3f, %5.3f, %5.3f" % [s.doctor_num, s.count, s.timing1, s.timing2, s.timing3]
        end
      end

    end

  end

  private
  def show_stats(stats)
    stats.each do |s|
      puts "%6d, %5.3f, %s" % [s.count, s.timing, s.index_type]
    end
  end

  def measure_performance(doctor_num = "99602326")
    start = Time.now
    n_public = Encounter.where(:private_physician => doctor_num, :notify_physician => 'Y', :visible_count.gt => 0).all
    delta = Time.now - start
    delta
  end

  def show_indexes
    puts "%s INDEXES %s" % ["*"*12, "*"*12]
    Encounter.collection.index_information.collect { |index| puts "    #{index[0]}" }
  end

  def add_index(new_index)
    coll = MongoMapper.database.collection('encounters')
    coll.drop_index(new_index) if !coll.index_information.detect { |index| index[0] == new_index }.nil?
    Encounter.ensure_index(new_index)
  end

end

Results:

The effect of adding indexes on query performance

The results are shown in the accompanying graph. Except for the query that returned 24 documents, the general trend was that 3 indexes were better than one. And one was w-a-a-a-y better than none (of course, you already knew that). The odd outlier being for count = 6, in that a single index did not perform as well as it did in all the other tests.

A Walk Through the Valley of Indexing in MongoDB

As you walk through the valley of MongoDB performance, you will undoubtedly find yourself wanting to optimize your indexes at some point or other.

How to Watch Your Queries

Run your database with profiling on. I have an alias for starting up mongo in profile mode (‘p’ stands for profile):

alias mongop="<mongodb-install>/bin/mongod
      --smallfiles --noprealloc --profile=1 --dbpath <mongodb-install>/data/db"

This will default to considering queries > 100ms being deemed “slow.”

Add a logger (if you are using MongoMapper) and tail the log file to see the queries.

##### MONGODB SETTINGS #####
# You can use :logger => Rails.logger, to get output of the mongo queries, or create a separate logger.
logger = Logger.new('mongo-development.log')
MongoMapper.connection = Mongo::Connection.new('localhost', 27017, {:pool_size => 5, :auto_reconnect => true, :logger => logger})
MongoMapper.database = "mdalert-development"

Run your query/exercise the app.

Examine the mongo log (trimmed for legibility), and look for the primary collection you were querying (bolded below).

['$cmd'].find(#"settings", "query"=>{:identifier=>"ItemsPerPage"}, "fields"=>nil}>).limit(-1)
['$cmd'].find(#"accounts", "query"=>{:state=>"active"}, "fields"=>nil}>).limit(-1)
['accounts'].find({:state=>"active"}).limit(15).sort(email1)
['settings'].find({:identifier=>"AutoEmail"}).limit(-1)

Use MongoDB’s Explain to dig deeper.

Open up the mongo shell (<mongodb-install>/bin/mongo) and enter the query that you want explained. Hint, you can take much of it from the query in the log.

Without any indexes, you can see the query is scanning the entire table basically. A bad thing! Another tip is the cursor type is “BasicCursor.”

> db.accounts.find({state: "active"}).limit(15).sort({email: 1}).explain();
{
  "cursor" : "BasicCursor",
  "nscanned" : 11002,
  "nscannedObjects" : 11002,
  "n" : 15,
  "scanAndOrder" : true,
  "millis" : 44,
  "nYields" : 0,
  "nChunkSkips" : 0,
  "isMultiKey" : false,
  "indexOnly" : false,
  "indexBounds" : {
  }
}

Since I was doing a find on state, and a sort on email (or last_name), I added a compound index using MongoMapper (you could have just as easily done it at the mongo console).

Account.ensure_index([[:state,1],[:email,1]])
Account.ensure_index([[:state,1],[:last_name,1]])

Re-running the explain, you can see

  • the cursor type is now BtreeCursor (i.e., using an index)
  • the entire table is not scanned.
  • The retrieval went from 44 millis down to 2 millis
  • Success!!
> db.accounts.find({state: "active"}).limit(15).sort({email: 1}).explain();
{
  "cursor" : "BtreeCursor state_1_email_1",
  "nscanned" : 15,
  "nscannedObjects" : 15,
  "n" : 15,
  "millis" : 2,
  "nYields" : 0,
  "nChunkSkips" : 0,
  "isMultiKey" : false,
  "indexOnly" : false,
  "indexBounds" : {
    "state" : [ [ "active", "active" ] ],
    "email" : [ [ {"$minElement" : 1}, {"$maxElement" : 1} ] ]
  }
}

Fiddling a Bit More – Using the Profiler

You can drop into the mongo console and see more specifics using the mongo profiler.

> db.setProfilingLevel(1,15)
{ "was" : 1, "slowms" : 100, "ok" : 1 }

For this example, I cleared the indexes on accounts. and I ran the following query, and examined its profile data.
Note: the timing can vary over successive runs, but it generally is fairly consistent — and it is close to the “millis” value you see in explain output.

> db.accounts.find({state: "active"}).limit(15).sort({email: 1})
> db.system.profile.find();
{ "ts" : ISODate("2011-11-27T21:09:04.237Z"),
  "info" : "query mdalert-development.accounts
  ntoreturn:15 scanAndOrder
  reslen:8690
  nscanned:11002
  query: { query: { state: "active" },
    orderby: { email: 1.0 } }
    nreturned:15 163ms", "millis" : 43 }

Now let’s add back the indexes… one at a time. First up, let’s add “state.”

> db.accounts.ensureIndex({state:1})
>db.accounts.find({state: "active"}).limit(15).sort({email: 1})
db.system.profile.find({info: /.accounts/})
{ "ts" : ISODate("2011-11-27T21:26:29.801Z"),
  "info" : "query mdalert-development.accounts
  ntoreturn:15 scanAndOrder
  reslen:546
  nscanned:9747
  query: { query: { state: "active" },
    orderby: { email: 1.0 }, $explain: true }
    nreturned:1 81ms", "millis" : 81 }

Hmmm. Not so good! Let’s add in the compound index that we know we need, and run an explain:

>db.accounts.ensureIndex({state:1,email:1})
> db.accounts.find({state: "active"}).limit(15).sort({email: 1}).explain()
{
	"cursor" : "BtreeCursor state_1_email_1",
	"nscanned" : 15,
	"nscannedObjects" : 15,
	"n" : 15,
	"millis" : 0,

And sure enough, we get good performance. The millis is so small, that this query will not show up in the profiler.

If you want to clear the profile stats, you’ll soon find out you can’t remove the documents. The only way I saw how to do it was as follows:

  • restart mongod in non-profiling mode
  • reopen the mongo console and type:
    db.system.profile.drop()

You should now see the profile being empty:

> show profile
db.system.profile is empty

Now you can restart mongod in profiling mode and see your latest profiling data without all the ancient history.

Some Gotchas

Regex searches cannot be indexed

If your query is a regex, then the index can’t help. With regex, retrieval is 501 ms (not bad, given 317K records):

> db.message_logs.find({patient_name:/ben franklin/i}).sort({created_at:-1}).explain()
{
	"cursor" : "BtreeCursor patient_name_1 multi",
	"nscanned" : 317265,
	"nscannedObjects" : 27,
	"n" : 27,
	"millis" : 501,
	"nYields" : 0,
	"nChunkSkips" : 0,
	"isMultiKey" : false,
	"indexOnly" : false,
	"indexBounds" : {
		"patient_name" : [ [ "", { } ], [ /ben franklin/, /ben franklin/ ] ]
	}
}

Without regex, it is essentially instantaneous:

> db.message_logs.find({patient_name:'Ben Franklin'}).sort({created_at:-1}).explain()
{
	"cursor" : "BtreeCursor patient_name_1",
	"nscanned" : 27,
	"nscannedObjects" : 27,
	"n" : 27,
	"scanAndOrder" : true,
	"millis" : 0,
	"nYields" : 0,
	"nChunkSkips" : 0,
	"isMultiKey" : false,
	"indexOnly" : false,
	"indexBounds" : {
		"patient_name" : [ [ "Ben Franklin", "Ben Franklin" ] ]
	}
}

Tips for examining profiler output

  • Look at the most recent offenders:
    show profile
  • Look at a single collection:
    db.system.profile.find({info: /message_logs/})
  • Look at a slow queries:
    db.system.profile.find({millis : {$gt : 500}})
  • Look at a single collection with a specific query param, and a response >100ms:
    db.system.profile.find({info: /message_logs/, info: /patient_name/, millis : {$gt : 100}})

Summary

So here you have an example of how to see indexes in action, how to create them, and how to measure their effects.

References:

 

Configuring MongoMapper Indexes in Rails App

Not quite sure where the best place is to define MongoDB indexes via MongoMapper in a Rails app… My progression has been:

  1. as part of the key definition in the model class
  2. in a rails initializer
  3. hybrid between initializer and model
  4. rake task invoking model methods

Define Indexes on the Keys

This works fine during development.

class Account
  include MongoMapper::Document
  ...
  # Attributes ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
  key :login, String, :unique => true, :index => true
  key :msid, String, :index => true
  key :doctor_num, String, :index => true
  ...
end

Define Indexes in an Initializer

When I wanted to trigger a new index creation, I would add it here. Only problem is that restarting a production server with tons of data gets held up by the create index task.

# Rails.root/config/initializers/mongo_config.rb
Account.ensure_index(:last_name)
Group.ensure_index(:name)
Group.ensure_index(:group_num)
...

Define Indexes in a Class Method, Invoke in Initializer

A small tweak to putting indexes into an initializer was to place the knowledge of the indexes back into the model classes themselves. Then, all you needed to do was invoke the model class method to create it’s own indexes.

The Initializer Code

 
# Rails.root/config/initializers/mongo_config.rb
Event.create_indexes
Encounter.create_indexes
Setting.create_indexes

The Model(s) Code

 
class Setting
  include MongoMapper::Document
  # Attributes ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
  # What the user sees as a label
  key :label, String
  # How we reference it in code
  key :identifier, String, :required => true
  ...
  # Indexes :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
  def self.create_indexes
    self.ensure_index(:identifier, :unique => true)
    self.ensure_index(:label, :unique => true)
  end
  ...
end

Enter the Rake!

Of course, you could also invoke the index creation code in a rake task, as pointed out here.

The beauty behind a rake task as best I can tell is this:

  • You can run it at any time to update the indexes
  • You do not bring a deploy to a screeching halt because you are waiting for index creation

I was already standardizing on how I was creating indexes inside each model class — where better to keep on top of what the indexes for a class should be than in the class itself!

# app/models/setting.rb
class Setting
  ...
  def self.create_indexes
    self.ensure_index(:identifier, :unique => true)
    self.ensure_index(:label, :unique => true)
  end
  ...
end

I created a new class in the model directory (so that it is close to where the models are defined) that simply loops through each model class to generate the proper indexes:

# app/models/create_indexes.rb
class CreateIndexes
  def self.all
    puts "*"*15 + " GENERATING INDEXES" + "*"*15
    MongoMapper.database.collection_names.each do |coll|
      # Avoid "system.indexes"
      next if coll.index(".")

      model = coll.singularize.camelize.constantize
      model.create_indexes if model.respond_to?(:create_indexes)
      model.show_indexes if model.respond_to?(:show_indexes)
    end
  end
end

You can invoke it easily from the Rails console: CreateIndexes.all

Next I created a rake task (in lib/tasks/indexes.rake) that invoked the ruby code to do the indexing mojo.

namespace :db do
  namespace :mongo do
    desc "Create mongo_mapper indexes"
    task :index => :environment do
      CreateIndexes.all
    end
  end
end

Any tips/comments/insights appreciated…

PS: self.show_indexes Mix-in

I created a mix-in for the “show_indexes()” class method for each model. I could not add it directly to the MongoMapper::Document class unfortunately — I ran into errors and finally gave up. Here’s the mix-in that I defined in lib/mongo_utils.rb:

module MongoMapper
  module IndexUtils
    puts "Customizing #{self.inspect}"
    module ClassMethods
      def show_indexes
        puts "%s #{self.name} INDEXES %s" % ["*"*12, "*"*12]
        self.collection.index_information.collect do |index|
          puts "    #{index[0]}#{index[1].has_key?("unique") ? " (unique)":"x"}"
        end
      end
    end
    def self.included(base)
      #puts "#{base} is being extended'"
      base.extend(ClassMethods)
    end
  end
end

And you use it as follows:

require 'mongo_mapper'
require 'mongo_utils'
class Setting
  include MongoMapper::Document
  include MongoMapper::IndexUtils
  ...

Development with MongoMapper

A question popped up:

Mongo is schema-less, that means we can create new fields when needed, I read the mongo mapper document, it still needs to write model code like below, so we have to change the code below when we need new field, is this kind of limitation to use the schema-less database mongodb?

class User
  include MongoMapper::Document

  key :first_name, String
  key :last_name, String
  key :age, Integer

Strict answer: NO, you do not have to change the model code to add a new “column” to your “table.”

I like to think of MongoMapper as making my domain classes behave more like an object-oriented database than a data management layer.

During rapid development, having a database that just follows along with your model makes for speedy feature creation and prototyping. Though “migrations” being first-class citizens, of sort, in Rails is a great step forward for managing development changes with traditional schema databases, MongoDB doesn’t even require that level of concern.

That said, it also implies you, as the developer/designer/architect, are treated as an individual willing to take on the responsibility of wielding this amount of “power” (just like Ruby does).

Therefore, even though you do not technically have to add keys to your MongoMapper document class, if you are talking about core aspects of your domain, I would add the keys so as to make it clear what you are modeling.

Now, there may be certain cases where a class is just storing a bunch of random key-value pairs that are not key elements of your domain, with the sole purpose of merely showing them later. Maybe you are parsing data or taking a feed of lab results, for example, and just need to format the information without searching or sorting or much of anything. In this situation, you do not need to care about adding the (unknown) keys to the model class.

As the saying goes, “just because you *can* do something does not mean you *should* do something.”