Exploring MongoHQ with F#

Recently, I've been working on a Silverlight 4 project which will hopefully go live soon.
This project started off nice and light as all green field projects do, and then the unavoidable requirement came up... storage. A few customers utter'd access. After I finished  laughing I thought to myself- maybe SQL?
So I turned to my data structure and immediately realized that its not structured for SQL. I've played around with a few object databases... db4o, ravendb, etc. Then I remembered Mongodb, over the past several years this object database has received quite a bit of attention. I must admit I haven't paid much attention to it, so I decided to give it a world. Headed over to the spot, read through some of the docs and realized I need essentially two dll's.
1) MongoDB.Bson.dll
2) MongoDB.Driver.dll

So I downloaded it and ran through the introduction tutorial.
After I got the Mongod server up and running on my local box I was able to store and retrieve some mock data (using the mongo client) with ease.  Now it was finally time to write some code and see it in action.
So, I fired up FSI and produced the simple F# script.

#I @"D:\ODev Solutions\MongoDb\CSharpDriver"
#r "MongoDB.Bson.dll"
#r "MongoDB.Driver"

open MongoDB.Bson

open MongoDB.Bson.Serialization
open MongoDB.Driver
open MongoDB.Bson.IO

// helper func insert name_value in Bson document
let Bson_NameValue (name,value) =
 new BsonElement(name,BsonValue.Create value)

// helper func get all keys in a Bson document
let getkeys (document: BsonDocument) =
    document.Names

(* Connect to Mongo Server *)
let connectionString = "mongodb://localhost"
let server = MongoServer.Create connectionString
server.Connect

(* Get Database - if it does not exists then one is created. *)
let test = server.GetDatabase "test"

(* Store usernames and passwords *)
let profilescollection = test.GetCollection "mockprofiles"

(* Create the mock structure that will store a single user profile *)
type profile = {UserName : string; Password : string; }
let p = { UserName = "someuser@somedomain.com"; Password = "password"; }

let convert_profile_to_BsonDocument (p: profile) =
     let d = new BsonDocument()
    d.Add(Bson_NameValue("UserName",p.UserName)) |> ignore
    d.Add(Bson_NameValue("Password",p.Password)) |> ignore
    d
let profilebson = convert_profile_to_BsonDocument p

(* Insert the mock profile into the newly created profiles collection *)
profilescollection.Insert profilebson

*Retrieve mock profile*

(* Mongodb Query Document - can think of it as a where clause *)
let qd = new QueryDocument(Bson_NameValue("UserName","someuser@somedomain.com"))

let mockprofile = profilescollection.FindOne(qd)
printf  "UserName: %s   Password: %s" mockprofile.UserName mockprofile.Password

Okay, all good right? Wait... if I'm going to use this as production solution how do I even go about deploying something like Mongodb? Do I look for a hosting account that knows about monogo? Do I look for a hosting account that will give me full access to the box so that I can run mongo and manage it myself? After some searching around I found MongoHQ.

The guys over at monogohq make it super simple to setup a production object database.
They charge monthly or annually based on the disk space you use. Starting at free accounts up to 16mb and then progressively goes up from there. I like this solution a lot because I don't have to think about the maintenance and they provide an admin portal so I can manage the database and get reports from their web interface. As for the code changes there was only one. the connection string. =)

example: mongodb://username:password@flame.mongohq.com:portnumber/databasename

If you're considering a project with an object database check out Mongodb and MongoHQ.
Really slick!