Professional Node.js: Building Javascript Based Scalable Software

Chapter 25

Connecting to MongoDB Using Mongoose

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Installing and using Mongoose
• Defining schemas and models
• Understanding Mongoose data types
• Using schema validation
• Searching, inserting, and updating documents
• Paginating query results
• Defining indexes
• Using getters, setters, and virtual attributes
• Referencing documents
• Enriching models and document objects with higher-level methods

Document-oriented databases have regained popularity in recent years, being at the front and center of the NoSQL movement. These types of databases, unlike relational ones, don’t require you to specify the structure of your data ahead of time. Instead, you can change it organically as your project requires. Another important difference from a relational database is that the document is generally the atomic unit and can be as complete as needed, eliminating the need to make costly joins and transactions across tables.

MongoDB is a popular document-oriented database that enables you to perform rich dynamic queries using a powerful query language.

In MongoDB, data is organized such that one MongoDB database holds a series of collections. Each collection has a series of documents, and each document comprises a set of fields. A field is a key-value pair, where the key is a string and the value can be a basic type (like a string, integer, float, timestamp, binary, and so on), an embedded document, or a collection of any of these.

A MongoDB query can be described using a JavaScript ...