I’ve only ever used SQL Server and am only familiar with relational databases. You’ve probably heard all the talk about NoSQL and I thought I’d have a quick look at MongoDB which saves data in JSON documents rather than in relational format.
I’ve just managed to install it and set it up as a service running on Windows and it seems to work with out any problems. Here are the instructions I followed
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-windows/
I extracted the contents of the download to
D:\mongodb
and saved the following in a batch file so I can just double click to connect.
D:\mongodb\bin\mongo.exe
Just type “exit” to exit.
There is a very quick example of how to add and extract data on this page
db.test.save( { a: 1 } ) db.test.find()
When you run the find() command you’ll see that you get an “_id” field back. This is the unique identifier for the document, equivalent to a primary key in SQL. You can set this value in the document you save, for example
db.test.save( {_id: 1, a: 1 } )
That’s as far as I’ve got so far but I’ve also just signed up to “M101J: MongoDB for Java Developers” in https://education.mongodb.com/. It’s been 14 years since I last looked at any Java code so it might be a struggle.