August 2012 Summaries

Using MongoDB's capped collections and tailable cursors, developers can build a simple pub/sub system to communicate messages between processes. This allows for efficient retrieval of records from the server until some data becomes available, blocking until data is returned by the cursor. The use of tailed cursors offers a more efficient solution than constantly re-querying for new data. A basic example using Node.js demonstrates this functionality, where a subscriber can repeatedly poll the cursor for any new messages. This setup provides a powerful feature for performing complex queries and is a minimal effort alternative to existing messaging systems.

Mongo Connector is a generic connection system that integrates MongoDB with another system using simple CRUD operational semantics, allowing users to connect MongoDB to search engines, secondary clusters, relational databases, integration platforms, and other storage systems. The connector supports both Sharded Clusters and standalone Replica Sets, abstracting MongoDB internals, and provides a lightweight DocManager API for implementing CRUD operations. Mongo Connector is designed to be easy to use, with implementations available for Solr, ElasticSearch, and MongoDB, and can be installed using pip. It allows users to sync their data between MongoDB and other systems, such as search servers or relational databases.