MongoDB PHP Tutorial

“MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. Written in C++” – www.mongodb.org (mongodb.org)

There has been alot of publiclity on NOSQL databases over the last few months. CouchDB, Cassandra and Redis are known to be highly scalable and blazingly fast, yet setup and adoption for hobby developers has been relatively low because there is no need for such high scalability and they are relatively difficulty to get setup.

MongoDB strikes a balance between the familiarity and ease of use of MySQL, and the freeness and performance offered by document storage databases. The database has no set schema so you can add, remove and modify the structure of your documents without having to issue an UPDATE statement.

Installation & Setup

Installing MongoDB is very easy. The only setup required is to create the directory that Mongo stores the data in. In Windows the default location is C:\data\db\ and on *nix it is /data/db/. Once the directory is created, download the appropriate Mongo binary from the downloads page (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads) and run the bin/mongod file. Mongo should now be up and running.

Now we need to install the PHP extension for MongoDB. If your on Linux or Mac OS…