Schema Free

One of the key characteristics of MongoDB is the fact that is does not impose a pre-defined schema in the database.

We can add different types of fields, at different levels of the JSON data structure, as needed by the document, without being restricted by a particular predefined schema.

We can start our “collection” with the a simple assumption of how to represent a movie.

For example:

{
   title: "Back to the Future",
   year: 1985,
   director: "Robert Zemeckis",
   writers: [ "Robert Zemeckis", "Bob Gale" ],
   stars: [ "Michael J. Fox", "Christopher Lloyd", "Lea Thompson" ]
}

Then start exploring less standard types of movies.

For example One Day on Earth:

{
  title: "One Day on Earth",
  year: 2012,
  director: "Kyle Ruddick",
  creator: [ "Kyle Ruddick" ],
}

Here, instead of a “writer” we have a “creator”.

It helps to know that One Day on Earth is a documentary created by crowdsourcing video snippets from volunteers all across the world, in order to reconstruct 24 hours of life on planet earth.

There is therefore no writer, but a creator of the concept of the movie.

There are no stars or actors, but the thousands of people participating on the movie. With about 30,000 contributors, from every country in the world, recording in a single day, this is indeed a different kind of movie.

A new version of the movie will be published on December 12, 2012, and you can contribute your own video snippet to it by signing up here.

Exercise

Look for another movie that breaks the basic schema of a movie and create the document entry for it in the MongoDB database.