DadenU Day: MongoDB

By: Iain Brazendale, Development Manager

Weather data from OpenWeatherAPI routed to a MongoDB database, and then displayed in Datascape 2

At Daden we all enjoy new challenges, so once in a while we take a day out to do some blue skies research and spend a day working with technologies that we find interesting. These days are known as Daden U days and help the team to take a wider look at technology and encourage innovation.

I’ve always had an interest in Databases but have never had the opportunity to look into NoSQL, so for the Daden U day I spent some time investigating MongoDB.

MongoDB unlike traditional SQL databases is a document database and as such stores its data in an unstructured way. I love how easy it is to get JSON data into the database and extract it.

I’ve got to say a big well done to the team at MongoDB, the getting started documentation is some of the best I’ve seen. Being able to dive right into documentation specifically aimed at C# was fantastic. Installing MongoDB, adding data and writing the first program to read the data took less than five minutes. Trust me when I say this was a lot shorter than my first adventures (many years ago) with MSSQL and Perl.

So was the Daden U day worth it? Well I now know more about NoSQL than I did last week, and more importantly it has encouraged me to learn more. Was it worth it to the company? Well funnily enough a few days after the Daden U day a new client asked me “Do you know anything about MongoDB” and I was happy to reply “Yes”.