This is the first in a series of posts on MongoDB and PHP that will both explain why you should use MongoDB and teach you how. In this first post we will begin with installing the necessary servers and drivers to be able to use MongoDB with PHP.

Introduction to MongoDB

MongoDB (from “humongous”) is a scalable, high-performance, open source document database written in C++. While many people hear ‘document database’ and they think of pdf and doc files, the term document really is analogous to an array in PHP. Effectively MongoDB is a persistent storage engine for PHP arrays and objects (as well as any other language) with read through, write thorough memory caching, true high availability,  an elegant interface and seamless horizontal scale. Once you write an application with MongoDB you’ll wonder why anyone uses anything else.

Installing MongoDB

Installing MongoDB is as easy as using your package installer to install the package. Whether you are using Linux, Mac or Windows, it’s easy to install MongoDB.

The MongoDB Manual has a complete guide on installing MongoDB for all the different systems it supports.

Installing PHP Driver for MongoDB

The 1st step is to install PECL. PECL is the default installer for all C extensions to the PHP driver. Usually if you have PHP installed you already have PECL. You may be surprised to find that Mac OS X doesn’t include PECL, in the event you don’t have PECL already, here’s how to install it.

Installing PEAR & PECL

1. cd /usr/lib/php
2. sudo php install-pear-nozlib.phar
3. Edit /etc/php.ini and find the line:  ;include_path = ".:/php/includes"
   change it to: include_path = ".:/usr/lib/php/pear"
   make sure to remove the ‘;’ at the beginning of that line.
4. sudo pear channel-update pear.php.net
5. sudo pecl channel-update pecl.php.net
6. sudo pear upgrade-all

Once you have PECL installed the process is easy to install the Mongo DB driver. A simple

pecl install mongo

is all it takes. Once that’s completed you’ll need to add the extension line to your PHP.ini file and restart Apache. For *nix the line is

extension=mongo.so

Once Apache is restarted you should confirm that the MongoDB extension is installed by checking php_info(). A shortcut for this is

$ php --re mongo

Creating your first connection to MongoDB

Creating a connection to MongoDB is pretty easy. We create a new Mongo object and pass in the URI of the server you’re connecting to. The following example will show you how to connect to a Mongo DB server, create a db and a collection and insert a single record into that collection.

Stay tuned for my next post which I will demonstrate how to perform basic crud operations in MongoDB.

I’ve included a slightly longer version of the presentation given which includes a few slides that I cut out for brevity to fit in the allocated time while still allowing time for questions.

Another presentation I gave is similar but takes a broader review on MongoDB, including example schemas, queries and how sharding and replication work with MongoDB.

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• Follow me on Twitter @spf13
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The new site provides instructions on installing spf13-vim on any platform and contains an overview of all the included modules along with a getting started guide.

Here’s how to get started with a MongoDB backed Drupal.

As it currently stands it is not possible for Drupal to run a pure MongoDB installation with Drupal. Drupal has made a lot of progress towards abstracting out database connectivity into a central model layer with Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 promises even more. However it is still a work in progress and while a majority of the functionality is available as MongoDB backed, as it stands today a few of the components remain dependant on SQL.

As most of the work to port Drupal to MongoDB has been towards scalability and performance, it is possible to have a site where public page views are 100% on MongoDB. Performance benchmarks on a MongoDB backed Drupal instance are quite impressive.

Installing MonogDB

These are the very brief instructions and make some assumptions. For more complete installation instructions please see the documentation.

Installing on linux

apt-get install mongodb-10gen or yum install mongodb

Installing on windows

Follow the install directions on the MongoDB site.

Installing on mac

brew install mongodb

Installing the MongoDB PHP driver

The complete directions can be found in the MongoDB PHP documentation.

Using Pecl to install the driver

Pecl is the preferred way to install the MongoDB driver. If you haven’t used pecl before, you may need to install some prerequisites first.

pecl install mongo

Configuring PHP to use the driver

Using your favorite editor add the following line to your php.ini file.

extension=mongo.so

Installing Drupal

This is the most complicated part and I will simply provide the excellent directions already given in the Drupal install.txt file with a few clarifications.

1. Download and extract Drupal.

You can obtain the latest Drupal release from http://drupal.org — the files
are available in .tar.gz and .zip formats and can be extracted using most
compression tools.

To download and extract the files, on a typical Unix/Linux command line, use
the following commands (assuming you want version x.y of Drupal in .tar.gz
format):

wget http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.y.tar.gz 

tar -zxvf drupal-x.y.tar.gz

This will create a new directory drupal-x.y/ containing all Drupal files and
directories. Then, to move the contents of that directory into a directory
within your web server’s document root or your public HTML directory,
continue with this command:

 mv drupal-x.y/* drupal-x.y/.htaccess /path/to/your/installation

2. Create the Drupal database.

Because Drupal stores all site information in a database, you must create
this database in order to install Drupal, and grant Drupal certain database
privileges (such as the ability to create tables). Currently this needs to be a relational database. Drupal supports SQLite, PostgreSQL and MySQL. For details, consult INSTALL.mysql.txt, INSTALL.pgsql.txt, or INSTALL.sqlite.txt. You may also
need to consult your web hosting provider for instructions specific to your web host.

Take note of the username, password, database name, and hostname as you
create the database. You will enter this information during the install.

3. Run the install script.

To run the install script, point your browser to the base URL of your
website (e.g., http://www.example.com).

You will be guided through several screens to set up the database, add the
site maintenance account (the first user, also known as user/1), and provide
basic web site settings.

During installation, several files and directories need to be created, which
the install script will try to do automatically. However, on some hosting
environments, manual steps are required, and the install script will tell
you that it cannot proceed until you fix certain issues. This is normal and
does not indicate a problem with your server.

Integrating MongoDB and Drupal

Installing the Drupal MongoDB plugin

The MongoDB Drupal plugin installs like any drupal plugin. Either install via the administration screen, or simply download the module at http://drupal.org/project/mongodb and uncompress it into the sites/all/modules/ directory.

Configure Drupal to use the MongoDB plugin

Currently there isn’t an admin interface to configure MongoDB, luckily it’s easy enough to configure manually.

First create a file called local.settings.php (it should be in the same directory as settings.php).

Populate the file with the following contents. Make sure to replace the placeholders [YOURDATABASENAME] and [SITENAME].

YOURDATABASENAME name can be anything doesn’t need to be created prior to use.
SITENAME will either be your sitename as it is named in Drupal. It may be called ‘Default’ if this is the primary site for the Drupal installation.

Enabling the MongoDB Module

Login to your drupal administration screen.

Navigate to the modules management screen.

First we need to disable the block module from Drupal Core. This will conflict with the MongoDB Block module and Drupal won’t let you enable the MongoDB plugin with this enabled. Uncheck Block and click save.

Now as the screenshot below demonstrates scroll to the bottom of the modules adminstration screen to the MongoDB section and enable all the modules.

Resources

• http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/practical-mongodb-and-drupal
• http://cyrve.com/mongodb
• http://www.slideshare.net/ForestMars/mongo-drupal
• http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS
• http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Quickstart+Windows
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/mongo.installation.php
• http://vim.spf13.com

Published by O’Reilly, it’s now available on Amazon, O’Reilly Media and a bunch of other sites. It’s available as a ebook as well as in print.

From the introduction:

What would happen if you optimized a data store for the operations application developers actually use? You’d arrive at MongoDB, the reliable document-oriented database. With this concise guide, you’ll learn how to build elegant database applications with MongoDB and PHP.

Written by the Chief Solutions Architect at 10gen—the company that develops and supports this open source database—this book takes you through MongoDB basics such as queries, read-write operations, and administration, and then dives into MapReduce, sharding, and other advanced topics. Get out of the relational database rut, and take advantage of a high-performing system optimized for operations and scale.

• Learn step-by-step the tools you need to build PHP applications with MongoDB
• Perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations, and learn how to perform queries to retrieve data
• Administer your database, and access and manipulate data with the MongoDB Shell
• Use functions to work with sets, arrays, and multiple documents to perform synchronous, asynchronous, and atomic operations
• Discover PHP’s community tools and libraries, and why they’re valuable
• Work with regular expressions, aggregation, MapReduce, replication, and sharding

So far reviews have been quite positive, with most criticisms coming from the short length. O’Reilly has begun a new program where they release shorter books for less money and get them to market much quicker. It makes a lot of sense, most tech books take 2 – 3 years to write the 200 – 400 pages and by the time the are ready to print, a lot of the technology has changed.  The nice thing about these shorter books is they are on the market much faster and much less over head is spent. It also makes for easier reading for you as it’s more digestible.

MongoDB and PHP  tops out just shy of 80 pages, my contract with O’Reilly was for 50 pages so I did my very best to put as much as possible into the text and completely agree with the challenge of covering an entire topic in a short amount of space.

That said, I do feel it’s fairly comprehensive and invite anyone to message me and I’ll gladly write a blog post explaining the topic in further detail.

I really enjoyed the process of writing a book. It was a lot of work with a lot of very late nights and patience on the part of my family with whom I’m very appreciative.

Purchasing MongoDB and PHP

You can purchase the book directly from O’Reilly in a non DRM format here.

You can purchase from Amazon here:

Reviews

“I have already have read the book MongoDB: The Definitive Guide by Kristina Chodorow and Michael Dirolf . It doesn’t cover much on the PHP, but its a good book to learn about MongoDB and how it works in Depth. Once I saw the book, MongoDB and PHP by Steve Francia I was planning to buy it, and the time I got a chance to signup for the blogger review program by O’Reilly Media. Its a small book of 60 pages, but a good one. I will rate 7.5 / 10 , a good read for PHP Developers . If you wondered why the 2.5 is missing read on” Full Review >
– Hari K T, harikt.com/blog

The two hardest data types to model are e-commerce and genealogy. There really just isn’t any good way to do it in a relational database. MongoDB is the answer Genealogy developers have been looking for for a very long time. A flexible schema that allows adhoc searching, horizontal scale and full data integrity. The following presentation covers MongoDB fundamentals, how to build a graph in MongoDB, how model genealogical data.

The principles explained apply equally well in RDBMSs, MongoDB and other databases.

Potential scenarios to protect against

1. Drive failure

2. Machine failure

3. Switch failure

4. Power circuit failure

5. Data center failure

6. Intrusion

7. Fat fingers

8. Programmer error

Raid

To prevent drive failure use multiple drives in a single machine for high availability. RAID 10 provides the best performance with high availability. RAID 10 consists of a minimum of 4 disks which are split into mirrored pairs. The raid controller stripes across the pairs.

Replication

Replication is the act of mirroring the data from one server onto another. It will protect against any failure of one (or more) of machines. Commonly two or more machines are used. If properly configured it can also protect against most of the failures identified above. I will present a few different configurations and what they protect against.

Replica Sets

In addition to standard Master Slave replication MongoDB provides an additional replication configuration called replica sets. Replica sets are similar to master slave, but they are set aware with automatic failover and recovery. Replica sets are a minimum of 3 nodes. 3 nodes can be 3 database nodes, or 2 database nodes + 1 arbiter. The arbiter doesn’t handle queries or store data, but is around to provide a third perspective to cast a vote when determining the status of the set. In master slave you can have the same setup but it requires you to participate as the arbiter.

Configuration 1 :

2 nodes + 1 arbiter (or 3 nodes) on same rack (same switch and power circuit).

• Protects against single drive failure (if not using RAID 0 or 10).
• Protects against single node failure.

Configuration 2 :

2 nodes + 1 arbiter on 3 different racks (different switch and power circuit).

• Protects against the above + failure of switch or power circuit.

Configuration 3 :

4 nodes + 1 arbiter on 3 different racks (different switch and power circuit).

• Protects against the above + two nodes failing or a node failure at the same time as a switch or power failure.

Configuration 4 :

4 nodes + 1 arbiter in 3 different data centers.

• Protects against all the above + data center failure.

Configuration 5 :

Any combination of the above but swap out the arbiter for a delayed secondary with priority 0 (hidden).

Some Protection against data loss in the event of Intrusion, Fat finger (sysadmin / DBA accidentally deleting / changing something), programmer error.

Only partial protection as any data written during the delay window will be lost. If not caught during the window (or windows) provides no protection.

Backups

A backup consists of a dump of the data ideally stored in a remote secure location. It’s important to ensure that the backup format used has an easy and consistent import mechanism. Any scripts you use to backup should have a counterpart restore written along with them. The worst possible time to discover issues with your backup is when you are trying to restore them. Make sure restoration is rock solid.

For permanent disaster recovery and for compliance with a variety of industry regulations it’s important to keep (offsite) backups. Depending on your data size, business and type of data you may want to take backups more or less regularly. A solid backup plan is the only way to ensure that the bulk of your data is never lost in the event of a disaster. It is often not enough to have replication be your sole form of backup as it doesn’t protect against intrusion, fat finger (sysadmin / DBA accidentally deleting / changing something) or programmer error outside of the delay window and not at all without a delayed replicant.

Conclusion

It’s important to understand the pitfalls and how to prevent them. Also recognize that there’s a balance that must be struck. Multiple data centers add additional complexity and bring a number of challenges along with their additional protection.

Lastly, Replication != backup. Please backup your data. If someone accidentally or intentionally maliciously performs a drop operation that same operation will be replicated across all of your machines. The only safety net is a good backup strategy.

The full recording can be found at 10gen’s site at http://www.10gen.com/events/hybrid-applications

 Other Resources:

• http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongosv-2011/mongodb-at-customink-adoption-operations-and-community
• http://jwage.com/2010/08/25/blending-the-doctrine-orm-and-mongodb-odm/
• http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongosf2011/craigslist
• http://spf13.com/post/ecommerce-in-la
• http://spf13.com/post/mongodb-sort-conference-2011
• http://spf13.com/post/mongodb-e-commerce-and-transactions

 EaseUS® Partition Master 9.1 Home Edition

As Partition Magic alternative, EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition is a ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management freeware. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk under Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 (SP1 included) 32 bit and 64 bit system.

 

Process Hacker

Effectively a better version of Task Manager, Process Hacker is a free and open source process viewer and memory editor with unique features such as powerful process termination. It can show services, processes and their threads, modules, handles and memory regions.

TeraCopy

TeraCopy is designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. The program skips bad files during the copying process, and then displays them at the end of the transfer so that you can see which ones need attention. TeraCopy can automatically check the copied files for errors by calculating their CRC checksum values. It also provides a lot more information about the files being copied than its Windows counterpart. TeraCopy integrates with Windows Explorer’s right-click menu and can be set as the default copy handler. It replaces Explores copy and move functionality and instead provides excellent move and copy support.

 

WinDirStat

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows. It works well and is very fast.

Write Monkey

Write Monkey is a knock off of the Write Room full screen distraction free applications for OS X. It’s quite well done and free.

Putty & Putty Connection Manager

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Windows and Unix platforms, along with an 

xterm

 terminal emulator. Putty Connection Manager can be used as tabbed version of Putty. It works on all the editions of Windows OS i.e Windows XP, Server 2003,Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7.

 

I really enjoyed my time in LA and am looking forward to returning. I was impressed by how many companies are using MongoDB in LA and how great the interaction was at the Meetup.