Export Queries to Your Favorite Programming Languages with MongoDB for VS Code

Massimiliano Marcon
December 7, 2021

In MongoDB for VS Code 0.7.0 we introduced the ability to export queries and aggregations that you’ve drafted in a playground to your favorite programming language. Going from prototype to code is now easier than ever.

At MongoDB, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can make developer workflows as easy as possible. This is why last year we released MongoDB for VS Code, an extension that lets you easily work with MongoDB from your VS Code environment.

Since that first release, we have been looking at how developers use the extension and we have been talking to a lot of our users to understand what else we could add to make them even more productive.

Everybody we talked to, really enjoyed the ability to navigate and explore their data and keep an eye on their MongoDB collections right next to their application code. We also learned that a lot of our users take advantage of Playgrounds to prototype their queries and make sure they return the results they expect with the performance they expect.

Other developers go even further. They use Playgrounds as a way to keep track of all the queries and aggregations their application code runs in one central place and they store playground files in git repositories together with their code.

This is a great way to document what the code is supposed to do when it talks to MongoDB so that other engineers on the team can always have an up-to-date birds-eye view of how the application interacts with the database.

With this use case in mind, we found an opportunity to streamline the workflow even further. We asked ourselves: what if, Playground files could be used as the source of truth for all queries and aggregations and the actual application code could just be automatically generated from there?

With the most recent release of MongoDB for VS Code, we took the first step in this direction. You can now select queries and aggregations within your Playground files and translate them into your favorite programming language. We currently have support for Node.js, Python, Java, and C#.

With this new addition to our VS Code extension, we are hoping to make the process of designing and testing your queries and getting them into your application easier and more effective. If you try out this new functionality and you want to share your feedback, feel free to submit ideas or feature requests on our feedback portal or to reach out directly to me on Twitter.

← Previous

10 Signs Your Data Architecture is Limiting Your Innovation: Part 1

For most businesses, the data layer is usually out of sight and out of mind. But that approach can mask the cause of major challenges facing a business — from slow time to market for new products to spiraling maintenance costs to a difficulty in focusing on innovation. The truth is, all of those issues are often rooted directly in the complexity of your data architecture. Whether you’re working with a cloud migration that has accumulated dozens of components or a legacy infrastructure that has been jerry-rigged to support modern applications, that complexity sucks up your developers’ time and resources, keeps you focused on maintenance, and creates data duplication and integration challenges that eat your budget. This complexity manifests in many different ways; as they accumulate, they can become a serious hindrance on your ability to bring innovative ideas to market. We think of the effect as a kind of tax — a tax that is directly rooted in the complexity of your data architecture. We call it DIRT — the Data and Innovation Recurring Tax. We have identified ten symptoms that can indicate your business is paying DIRT. For an in-depth view, read our white paper 10 Signs Your Data Infrastructure is Holding You Back . Symptom #1: Insights come by the month or week, not by the minute How can you serve your customers if you know nothing about them? In today’s world, insights into your customer and their needs are vital to survive, but real-time insights are what give you the competitive edge to thrive. Often, this seems to necessitate a separate database dedicated to analytics, with difficult-to-maintain ETL pipelines shuttling data between databases. But if you’re trying to match real-time insights with real-time behavior, then slow ETL pipelines put you behind before you’ve even started. And analytics databases often struggle to accommodate semi-structured, unstructured, and geospatial data. Meanwhile, the shape of your data is changing more quickly than your systems can adapt. Many organizations house their analytics in a data warehouse or a data lake. With a data warehouse or data lake, you still need to move data back and forth, introducing latency, rather than working with data where it resides. The whole process is still too slow to allow real-time analytics and power rich application experiences. Our solution: MongoDB’s application data platform solves this problem by allowing you to analyze data directly in the database in real time. Symptom #2: You can't construct a 360-degree view of your customer — or of anyone or anything What retailer wouldn’t want to have all its customer data, from clickstream to transaction history, in one place? What financial institution wouldn’t want a single view of exposure across asset classes, counterparties, and geographies? A single view, also known as a 360-degree view, can enable customer-service agents to be more helpful more quickly, because they have the data they need. A single view makes it more likely that fraud will be detected while it can still be stopped. And a single view makes it easier to comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), because you can see all your customer data in one place. Building a single view generally requires the integration of different types of data from different databases that don’t communicate. Finding one schema that will work for all the data types is extremely difficult. When you need to add new data, your old schema may not work. Our solution: Because MongoDB’s application data platform is built on the document model, it’s ideally suited to building 360-degree views. Our database supports rich customer objects, and it can accommodate any kind of data, no matter its format. These objects can be further enriched at any stage just by adding fields to a document — no schema migration necessary. For a complete view of DIRT, read our white paper DIRT and the High Cost of Complexity .

December 3, 2021

Next →

Data and the European Landscape: 3 Trends for 2022

The past two years have brought massive changes for IT leaders: large and complex cloud migrations; unprecedented numbers of people suddenly working, shopping and learning from home; and a burst in demand for digital-first experiences. Like everyone else, we are hoping that 2022 isn’t so disruptive (fingers crossed!), our customer conversations in Europe do lead us to believe the new year will bring new business priorities. We’re already noticing changes in conversations around vendor lock-in, thanks to the Digital Markets Act, a new enthusiasm for combining operational and analytical data to drive new insights faster, and a more strategic embrace of sustainability. Here’s how we see these trends playing out in 2022. Digital markets act draws new attention to cloud vendor lock-in in Europe We’ve heard plenty about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act , which, in the name of ensuring fair and open digital markets, would place new restrictions on companies that are deemed to be digital “gatekeepers” in the region. That discussion will be nothing compared to the vigorous debate we expect once the EU begins the very tricky political business of determining exactly which companies will fall under the act. If the EU sets the bar for revenues, users, and market size high enough, it’s possible that the regulation will end up affecting only Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But a European group representing 2,500 CIOs and almost 700 organizations is now pushing to have the regulation encompass more software companies. Their main concern centers around “distorted competition” in cloud infrastructure services and a worry that companies are being locked into one cloud vendor. A trend that will likely increase in 2022 that pushes back on cloud vendor lock-in is embracing multi-cloud strategies. We should expect to see more organisations in the region pursuing multi-cloud environments as a means to improve business continuity and agility whilst being able to access best of breed services from each cloud provider. As we have always said …”it’s fine to date your cloud provider….but don’t ever marry them.” The convergence of operational and analytical data The processing of operational and analytical data is almost always contained in different data systems, each tuned to that use case and managed by separate teams. But because that data lives in separate places, it’s almost impossible for organisations to generate insights and automate actions in real time, against live data. We believe 2022 is the year we’ll see a critical mass of companies in the region make significant progress toward a convergence of their operational and analytical data. We’re already starting to see some of the principles of microservices in operational applications, such as domain ownership, be applied to analytics as well. We’re hearing about this from so many of our customers locally, who are looking at MongoDB as an application data platform that allows them to perform queries across both real-time and historical data, using a unified platform and a single query API. This results in the applications they are building becoming more intelligent and contextual to their users, while avoiding dependencies on centralized analytics teams that otherwise slow down how quickly new, data-driven experiences can be released. Sustainability drives local strategic IT choice Technology always has some environmental cost. Sometimes that’s obvious — such as the energy needs and emissions associated with Bitcoin mining. More often, though, the environmental costs are well hidden. The European Green Deal commits the European Union to reducing emissions by 55% by 2030, with a focus on sustainable industry. With the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) recently completed in Glasgow, and coming off the hottest European summer on record, climate issues have become top of mind. That means our customers are increasingly looking to make their technical operations more sustainable — including in their choice of cloud provider and data centers. According to research from IDC , more than 20% of CxOs say that sustainability is now important in selecting a strategic cloud service provider, and some 29% of CxOs are including sustainability into their RFPs for cloud services. Most interesting, 26% say they are willing to switch to providers with better sustainability credentials. Historically, it’s been difficult to make a switch like that. That’s part of the reason we built MongoDB Atlas — to give our customers the flexibility to run in any region , with any of the three largest cloud providers, and to make it easy to switch between them, and even to run a single database cluster across them. Publicly available information about the footprint of individual regions and even single data centers will make it simpler for companies to make informed decisions. Already, at least one cloud platform has added indicators to regions with the lowest carbon footprint. Source: IDC, European Customers Engage Services Providers at All Stages of Their Cloud Journey, IDC Survey Spotlight, Doc #EUR248484021, Dec 2021

December 21, 2021