Question

How do you handle schema changes in Mongo db e.g. say after refactoring you change your object schema design and that impacts the document schema. Is there a way to update the document schema?

Answer 1

You can run an update on the entire schema, removing fields, or adding fields and setting them to calculated values, if that’s what you’re getting at.

Say you had an x field, and you want to add a y field that should be set to x/2, you could do something like this:

PRIMARY> db.test.insert({x:15});
PRIMARY> db.test.insert({x:30});
PRIMARY> db.test.insert({x:50}); 
PRIMARY> db.test.find();
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4f9df1ebed2b924eedb8cad9"), "x" : 15 }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4f9df1eeed2b924eedb8cada"), "x" : 30 }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4f9df1f1ed2b924eedb8cadb"), "x" : 50 }
PRIMARY> db.test.find().forEach(function(doc) { 
            doc.y = doc.x/2; 
            db.test.save(doc); 
         });
PRIMARY> db.test.find();
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4f9df1ebed2b924eedb8cad9"), "x" : 15, "y" : 7.5 }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4f9df1eeed2b924eedb8cada"), "x" : 30, "y" : 15 }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4f9df1f1ed2b924eedb8cadb"), "x" : 50, "y" : 25 }