Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

With the rise of Web 2.0, the need for a highly scalable database, capable of storing diverse user-generated content is increasing. MongoDB, an open-source, non-relational database has stepped up to meet this demand and is being used in some of the most popular websites in the world. MongoDB is one of the NoSQL databases which is gaining popularity for developing PHP Web 2.0 applications.PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is a fast-paced, hands-on guide to get started with web application development using PHP and MongoDB. The book follows a “Code first, explain later” approach, using practical examples in PHP to demonstrate unique features of MongoDB. It does not overwhelm you with information (or starve you of it), but gives you enough to get a solid practical grasp on the concepts.The book starts by introducing the underlying concepts of MongoDB. Each chapter contains practical examples in PHP that teache specific features of the database.The book teaches you to build a blogging application, handle user sessions and authentication, and perform aggregation with MapReduce. You will learn unique MongoDB features and solve interesting problems like real-time analytics, location-aware web apps etc. You will be guided to use MongoDB alongside MySQL to build a diverse data back-end. With its concise coverage of concepts and numerous practical examples, PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is the right choice for the PHP developer to get started with learning MongoDB.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
PHP and MongoDB Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

What is GridFS?


GridFS is MongoDB's solution for storing binary data in the database. It is a specification for handling large files in MongoDB. When I say specification, I mean it is not a feature of MongoDB itself; there is no code in MongoDB that implements it. GridFS just specifies how large files are to be handled in the database, and the language drivers (PHP, Python, Ruby, and so on) implement this specification and expose an API to the user of that driver (that's you) so you can use it to store/retrieve large files in MongoDB.

The rationale of GridFS

By design, a MongoDB document (a BSON object) cannot be larger than 16 megabytes. This is to keep performance at an optimum level. If there are documents larger than 16 MB, they are going to take up a lot of memory when you query them. GridFS specifies a mechanism for dividing a large file among multiple documents. The language driver that implements it, for example, the PHP driver, takes care of the splitting of the stored files...