CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrdbmsmongoidrails-engines
cultofmetatron
cultofmetatron

Reputation: 83

How should I go about using a rdbms and mongodb in a rails app?

I'm currently testing the waters with mongoid and have so far begun on an ecommerce store. Now of course mongoid doesn't have transactions so I'd like to ideally use mongoid for most of the app including authentication, authorization, product information etc.

However, the lack of transactions necessitate a return to an rdbms. The rdbms would be used purely to record financial transactions.

Is this possible in rails and has anyone done it?

I have limited experience with rails in general but I imagine having the secure part mounted as a engine and urls scoped under secure.myapp.com or myapp.com/secure/ and the user would be redirected to the ssl while rack takes care of things like shared sessions.

Would this work? Or has anyone found a better way of implementing this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 301

Answers (2)

JustinByrne
JustinByrne

Reputation: 61

While I can't comment directly on the rails aspect of the question, as with the first poster's response, MongoDB does support transactional updates. It's probably simpler to implement your entire system in Mongo, or in an RDBMS.

The real question is what is the motivation behind using mongo here? What are you hoping to gain from a document database model? Do you just want to rip RoR objects directly to mongo?

Just a suggestion, (abstractly) but you could just strictly define your objects up front, and represent that definition in your RDBMS. It will probably save you a lot of time if you don't have a clear motivation for using Mongo. Mongo is an awesome technology, but it's best for sorting through data and cataloging data, rather representing strict data structures (not that it's incapable of doing so, necessarily, but with a document database, you have a lot more flexibility with the content of each object within your db).

Good luck!

Upvotes: 0

Pan Thomakos
Pan Thomakos

Reputation: 34340

It is possible to mix mongoDB and a traditional RDMS, but you may have to do some extra coding on your part if you want ActiveRecord objects to communicate with MongoDB objects, since the ORMs are different. Keep in mind that while it is true that MongoDB does not support transactions across multiple documents, it does support 'transactional' atomic updates - which means that if all the data you are updating is contained within a single document you don't have to worry about transactions. MongoDB also supports safe updates, allowing you to verify that data has been written to n different replica servers and has been persisted to disk.

As for shared sessions between HTTPS and HTTP - this is not something you have to worry about. You'll define your session store as either MongoDB, MySQL, Memcached or, my recommendation, Cookies. As long as you define your domain as '.myapp.com' the cookies will be shared across all subdomains of your application regardless of the protocol.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions