MongoDB for Developers with Python Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Course topics
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So let's talk about what we're going to cover in this course. We're going to start by getting your machine set up and ready to go.
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It's important that you follow along in this course, that you do the code examples, that you play with the database, that's how we learn as developers.
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So the first thing we are going to do is walk through how to set up your operating system with MongoDB
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and the various other tools that we'll talk about later. Whether you're using MacOS, Windows or Linux,
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we have a video that shows you how to set this up correctly on your machine. Next, we'll dig into what is NoSQL, why do we want to use it,
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what are document databases, I touched a little bit on this in the beginning, but we'll go deep into document databases, how they work,
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and the trade-offs and benefits that we get from them. We'll then start work with MongoDB proper, we're going to fire up MongoDB
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and we're going to connect to it with its native shell and understand its low level native query syntax.
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If this was a relational database, this would be kind of like studying SQL, the TSQL language, but MongoDB doesn't use SQL,
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it uses its own query language which is easily understandable, but it is not the same.
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Now this is actually going to be in Javascript for the most part; you might be thinking this is a Python course, I don't want to learn Javascript.
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Well, for the most part we're going to write our code in Python and we're not going to do anything in Javascript,
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but you need to understand how the query syntax of the various tools and libraries in Python ultimately map down
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to what you could work with in the management tools, and in the management tools it's Javascript in the native query syntax.
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We'll make sure that we cover that really well here as a great foundation. Next up, we're going to talk about modeling data
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with documents rather than tables. You may have heard of third normal form and modeling through normalizing data in a relational database
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and to some degree, that knowledge carries forward into document databases, but there are certainly many other trade-offs
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and different types of modeling scenarios that you want to follow, you certainly don't want to just normalize your document database
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you'd be missing all of the benefits and getting some of the drawbacks potentially. So we'll see that in document databases in general,
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in MongoDB in particular, you model your data a little bit differently
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and have different trade-offs and considerations, and we'll talk about that here. At this point, it's time to start writing the code with Python.
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So we will begin at the primary lowest level that we can work with MongoDB, and this is PyMongo. So here we're going to work in a query language
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that is very, very similar to MongoDB's native Javascript language but we're going to do it from Python, and this works great,
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basically you're exchanging dictionaries and it's very fast and efficient. However, sometimes it makes a lot more sense
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to not just pass loosely typed dictionaries around but rather rich classes with lots of functionality and structure.
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So we're going to also talk about MongoEngine which is an ODM, object document mapper for MongoDB;
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think of this as an ORM, but because there is no relational bit, it's not a relational database, we call it document.
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So ODM for MongoDB and MongoEngine is one of the best ones, it works really well in Python 3 and Python 2,
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it has a whole bunch of features and different things you can add to your application on top of what MongoDB the database itself provides,
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for example like type checking, things like that, so really, really nice and you'll see that MongoEngine
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is a great addition to what you might be doing. Once we get the programming side in place we want to take our database and add tons of data to it,
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so we're going to take a simple example that we were playing with before
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and add something that has effectively millions or at least million records in it and then we're going to start interacting with it from MongoEngine,
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just as well it could have been PyMongo, right, we're going to start interacting with this database with lots of data
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and see that it doesn't perform quite as well as we hoped, maybe as well as all the hype around MongoDB being fast would make you expect.
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So we're going to see that we can take this server and it's kind of ok on its own, if we left it alone
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and we'll make it like five hundred times faster for some totally reasonable operations so we're going to talk about the various knobs and tools
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we have to make MongoDB really fast. They're not hard to do, but they are not automatic so you definitely want to learn about those.
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And finally, we're going to take all of what we've learned and deploy it into a cloud multi server environment
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so we are going to create what would be a fake web app, we'll just have a little Python script that stands in for the web app,
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put that on one server up in a cloud computing environment, on another one, we're going to set up a production hardened MongoDB server
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and we're going to make sure that MongoDB production server is totally locked down, running as safe as possible.
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There are a lot of non obvious things about running MongoDB in production and we want to make sure that it's working really well for us,
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so we're going to go through this section and do five or six different things to get MongoDB ready to be our production database.
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And that's it, this is what we cover the course, I think it's a really comprehensive introduction to MongoDB from Python,
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and I really hope you enjoy it, I really enjoyed creating it for you.