Question

In MySQL for example you have data types such as varchar, int, etc.
I googled and found http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/document/#bson-types page. It seems like with string you just use ” or “”. Integers seem to be automatically recognized without specifing the type. How would inserting something like this into mongoDB collection in Perl look like?

Example:
{
 "Name" : "John"
 "Age" :   20
 "Weight" : 180.5
 "Dateofbirth" : 01/01/1990
}

The reason why I want data type specified in the db is that I can use operators to compare numbers for example. If it is text I cannot do that.
So far I am thinking in Perl:

$my_collection->insert({
                        'Name' : "$Name",
                        'Age'  : $age,
                         'Weight':$weight,
                         'Dateofbirth': $datevar, 
                       } );

In the above code I am not sure how to specify the data type. For example to tell Weight is Double not integer or string.

Answer 1

For numeric types, the Perl MongoDB driver will go by whatever Perl thinks the number is. Perl has an internal flag for keeping track of whether something is a float or an int. The MongoDB driver will use 32 or 64-bit ints depending on your platform. If it looks like a string to Perl, it will be stored as a string in MongoDB.

For date types, you need to wrap the date in a DateTime object, or DateTime::Tiny if you use the dt_type attribute.