Manage Your Data with Mingo.io and Percona Distribution for MongoDB Operator

Manage Your Data with Mingo.io and Percona Distribution for MongoDB Operator

Deploying MongoDB on Kubernetes has never been simpler with Percona Distribution for MongoDB Operator. It provides you with an enterprise-ready MongoDB cluster with no manual burden. In addition to that, you also get automated day-to-day operations – scaling, backups, upgrades.

But once you have your cluster up and running and have a good grasp on managing it, you still need to manage the data itself – collections, indexes, shards. We at Percona focus on infrastructure, data consistency, and the health of the cluster, but data is an integral part of any database that should be managed. In this blog post, we will see how the user can manage, browse and query the data of a MongoDB cluster with mingo.io. Mingo.io is a tool that I have discovered recently and it reminded me of PHPMyAdmin, but with a great user interface, feature set, and that it is for MongoDB, not MySQL.

This post provides a step-by-step guide on how to deploy MongoDB locally, connect it with Mingo.io, and manage the data. We want to have a local setup so that anyone would be able to try it at home.

Deploy the Operator and the Database

For local installation, I will use microk8s and minimal cr.yaml for MongoDB, which deploys a one-node replica set with sharding. It is enough for the demo.

Start Kubernetes Cluster

As I use Ubuntu, I will install microk8s from snap:

We need to start microk8s and enable Domain Name Service (DNS) and storage support:

Kubernetes cluster is ready, let’s fetch kubeconfig from it to use regular kubectl:

MongoDB Up and Running

Install the Operator:

Deploy MongoDB itself:

Connect to MongoDB

To connect to MongoDB we need a connection string with the login and password. In this example, we expose mongos with a NodePort service type. Find the Port to connect to:

You can connect to the MongoDB cluster using the IP address of your machine and port 32609. 

To demonstrate the full power of Mingo, we will need to create a user first to manage the data:

Get userAdmin password

Run MongoDB client Pod

Connect to Mongo

Create the user in mongo shell:

The connection strict that I would use in Mingo would look like this:

IP address and port most likely would be different for you.

Mingo at Work

MongoDB cluster is up and running. Let’s have Mingo installed and configured.

First, download the latest version of Mingo from https://mingo.io/ On the first opening after installation you will be welcomed with the message about Mingo’s security.

Once you are prompted for your first MongoDB connection, paste your mongo URL into the field and submit. Now you are connected and ready to manage your data.

Now, let’s try two examples of how Mingo works.

Example 1

Let’s assume you have a collection called “Blog” and you want to rename it to “Articles”. First, locate the collection in the sidebar, right-click it and select “Rename collection…” in the context menu. Type the new collection name and hit Enter. That’s it.

Example 2

Let’s assume you have a collection called “orders” with the field “shippedDate”, and you want to rename this field to shipmentDate in every document that was created during 2020. How would you do this in the old way? Would it be easy? Let’s see how you can do this in Mingo.

Instead of complicated queries with dates, we can use a simple shorthand { “OrderDate”: #2020 } and press Submit to see the results. Now just expand any document and then right-click on shippedDate. From the context menu select “Rename Fields → Filtered documents…” and then just insert the correct name and hit Rename.

Example 3

Let’s customize the way we see the “Orders” collection, for example.

First, click CMD+T (or CTRL+T on Windows), start typing the name of the collection in the Finder until you see it. Then, using the up and down arrow keys, select the collection and press Enter. Alternatively, you can click on the collection in the sidebar.

When the collection is shown, Mingo picks a couple of columns to show. To add another column, click on the + icon and select the field to add. You can rearrange the columns by dragging their headers. Click on the column header to see all the actions for a column and explore them.

Projects

On top of regular MongoDB connections, Mingo offers “Projects”. A project is like a wrapper on several connections to different databases, such as development, production, testing. Mingo treats these databases as siblings and simplifies routine tasks, such as synchronization, backups, shared settings for sibling collections and many more.

Have a Quick Glance at Mingo in Action

Conclusion

Deploying and managing MongoDB clusters on Kubernetes is still in its early phase. Percona is committed to delivering enterprise-grade solutions to deploy and manage databases on Kubernetes.

We are focused on infrastructure and data consistency, whereas Mingo.io empowers users to perform data management on any MongoDB cluster.

Percona Distribution for MongoDB Operator contains everything you need to quickly and consistently deploy and scale Percona Server for MongoDB instances into a Kubernetes cluster on-premises or in the cloud. The Operator enables you to improve time to market with the ability to quickly deploy standardized and repeatable database environments. Deploy your database with a consistent and idempotent result no matter where they are used.

Mingo

As NodeJS developers, heavily using MongoDB for our projects, we have long dreamed of a better MongoDB admin tool.

Existing solutions lacked usability and features to make browsing and querying documents enjoyable. They would easily analyze data, list documents, and build aggregations, but they felt awkward with simple everyday tasks, such as finding a document quickly, viewing its content in a nice layout, or doing common actions with one click. Since dreaming only gets you so far, we started working on a new MongoDB admin.

Our goal at Mingo is to create a MongoDB GUI with superb user experience, modern design, and productive features to speed up your work and make you fall in love with your data.