Showing posts with label entity relationship diagram. Show all posts
Showing posts with label entity relationship diagram. Show all posts

Friday, July 28, 2017

MongoDB Developer Productivity in an Agile World



Most database developers will tell you that traditional relational SQL databases are not ideally suited for agile development.  They require a schema defined upfront and subsequent (costly) database migrations as the structure changes -- all things that don’t fit well within the two-three-week sprint cycles of an agile or Continuous Integration approach.
MongoDB on the other hand is built to free developers from upfront schema specification, even when changes occur.  It supports dynamic schemas, which can evolve along with the application, reducing both development effort and expensive migrations, making companies more reactive and agile.
Similarly, IT departments and vendors can no longer impose the illusion of one-size-fits-all tools and approaches to self-managed teams.  Developers want, and should get, the freedom to use the tools and features that can let them be the most productive.  
New-generation developer productivity tools allow for taking full advantage of agile development and MongoDB: IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments), GUI’s (Graphical User Interfaces), and data modeling software.
Multi-threaded Skills for the Future
Sharing a common development environment is a great way to work faster when you’re on a team. It helps get you closer to that state of meditative bliss known as “Deploy at Will.”  Achieving daily or even better, hourly, deployments to production means reducing code inventory - lines of code still log-jammed in the Dev/Test/CI/QA pipeline that are not yet delivering value to customers.
Studio 3T SQL query builder
SQL query builder

Studio 3T is an IDE that helps teams work better with MongoDB, irrespective of physical location or technical level.  Realizing that “one size never fits” for even one user let alone all users, it offers multiple querying options, including a drag-and-drop query builder, an auto-completion Intellishell, an Aggregation Pipeline builder, and in the most recent release, the option to write and run traditional SQL queries against your NoSQL collections.  A basic GUI (such as Robomongo) may be sufficient for an individual working on their personal project, but as soon as you have a team of three or more, with different needs, preferences and technical skill levels, and working to commercial deadlines to boot, then having a shared IDE to work in is really indispensable.
Visual Data Modeling for MongoDB Schemas
By the same token, while schemas for small applications may be simple enough that no documentation is necessary, the power and flexibility of JSON makes physical data modeling even more important.  It has been demonstrated time and again that data modeling accelerates development, significantly reduces maintenance, increases application quality, and lowers execution risks across the enterprise.  
A new generation of data modeling tools is available on the market to properly represent physical data models for MongoDB collections and views.  Hackolade is the pioneer for data modeling for NoSQL and multi-model databases.  It was built from the ground-up to support the polymorphic and evolving structure of JSON documents.  It helps the onboarding of NoSQL technology in corporate IT landscapes via a user-friendly visual interface and a more bottom-up, continuously changing, agile approach.  
Hackolade script and documentation generation
Scripts and documentation generation
Schema documentation provides the necessary map of the data to guide users through building the queries with Studio 3T.
One Size Fits None
The sign of mature growth in a platform is the richness of associated tooling that emerges over time. While platform vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and now with MongoDB in their wake, all naturally focus on a unitary enterprise use-case, the availability of quality tools makes the platform many times more flexible to a far wider variety of end users.  Like major RDBMS vendors before it, MongoDB has become the clear leader in the NoSQL market, in large part because of a healthy and growing ecosystem.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

The Tao of NoSQL Data Modeling

The idea for Hackolade came from my own personal need for a data modeling tool for NoSQL databases.  I searched the web, and couldn’t find one that would satisfy my needs.   I tried really hard to use existing tools!  After all, all I wanted was to give my credit card number and download the right tool to do my job.  The last thing on my mind was to embark on a new entrepreneurial adventure...


There is a short explanation for why I was not satisfied with the existing tools, and there's also a long answer below.  The short answer is simple and holds (almost) in this one picture:

data modeling, yelp challenge dataset, ERD
Reverse-engineering of Yelp Challenge dataset using traditional ERD tool

Periodically, Yelp awards prize money for interesting insights out of the analysis of their sample dataset.  In the past, it has led to hundreds of academic papers.  As the data is provided in JSON format, any NoSQL document database is a good candidate to store the data, and several blogs explain how to use MongoDB for the analysis.  Using a data modeling tool to discover the data structure should be a great first step...

Only problem is: the Yelp dataset is made of just five data collections in MongoDB, yet the traditional ER tools finish their reverse-engineering process by showing these stats:

If there are just five collections in the database, you would expect only five entities in the Entity Relationship diagram, one for each of the collections in MongoDB, right?  Something more like this:
data modeling, yelp challenge dataset, ERD
Reverse-engineering of Yelp Challenge dataset using Hackolade
Besides the more orderly aspect, this second diagram is also a lot easier to understand.  It is a closer representation of the physical storage, displaying nested JSON sub-objects as indentations rather than as separate boxes (entities) in the ERD -- in a manner similar to what you would find in a JSON document. 

And if you're developing or maintaining your own model, it is a lot easier to deal with the entire JSON structure in just one view, including all nested objects (arrays and sub-documents), than if you need to open a new entity for each nested object (like in the following picture representing the structure of just one of the Yelp documents...)
Yelp Business collection represented by a traditional ER tool

No wonder some developers of NoSQL applications don't want to hear about data modeling, when the diagram that is supposed to help understand and structure things, is actually more confusing, and doesn't look anywhere close to the physical documents being committed to the database!  A more natural view would be this one:

Yelp Businesses collection represented by Hackolade
To manage objects metadata, Hackolade provides a second view -- a hierarchical tree view -- similar to the familiar XSD tree:
Hierarchical tree view in Hackolade

One of the great benefits of this tree view is the handling of the polymorphic nature of JSON, letting the user define choices between different structures.

The reason for the difficulty with traditional ER tools in representing JSON nested structures is actually simple and logical: they were originally designed for relational databases, and their own persistence data model (how they store objects and metadata) is itself relational.

As a user, if you use a traditional ER diagramming tool for the data modeling of relational databases and apply it to a NoSQL database (MongoDB in this case), you are constrained by the original purpose and underlying data model of the tool itself.  And while it is quite creative of the vendor to make its tool "compatible" with MongoDB, it is clearly an afterthought, and it ends up not being very useful.

Just like NoSQL databases are built differently than relational databases, data modeling tools for NoSQL databases need to be engineered from the ground up to leverage the power and flexibility of JSON, with its ability to support nested semi-structured polymorphic data.  And to do that, the modeling tool cannot store its own data in flat relational tables!

Hackolade stores data model metadata in JSON (actually in JSON Schema, the JSON equivalent of XSD for XML), making it easy to represent JSON structures in a hierarchical manner that is close to the physical storage of the data.  And the user interface was built according to the specific nature and power of JSON.  This is why Hackolade is the pioneer for the data modeling of NoSQL and multi-model databases!

Longer answer

The challenges in modeling JSON with tools made for flat database structures are as follows:
  • similarity between JSON and its GUI representation
    • structure
    • sequence
    • indentation
  • clarity of complex models
  • meaning of relationship lines
  • representation of polymorphism

Structure

Contrary to conceptual modeling, JSON is a representation of the physical storage in the database as implemented, or intended to be implemented, in a NoSQL database (or multi-model DBMS.)  Entity Relationship modeling theory has worked wonders for the normalization of relational databases, in its ability to represent in diagrams: conceptual, logical, and physical models.  But ER theory has to be stretched for the purpose of NoSQL because of the power and flexibility provided by embedding,  denormalization, and polymorphism.

If the ERD is going to represent conceptual entities, then each embedded objet in a JSON document could (maybe simetimes) be represented by 1 box in the ERD.  However, we’re dealing here with physical storage, and therefore in such case, it is preferable to have:


1 JSON document = 1 entity = 1 box
in the ERD

That way, the contextual unity of the document can be preserved.


Sequence

Preserving in the ERD the sequence of the physical document helps legibility and understanding. 


As a consequence of splitting embedded objects from the main document, the ERD drawn with traditional tools makes things harder for the observer by not displaying the same sequence of fields in the diagram as in the physical JSON.



On the other hand, Hackolade's views (ERD and the hierarchical tree) both respect the physical sequence of the document:

Indentation

Indentation of embedded objects in JSON (arrays and sub-documents) helps legibility.  As another consequence of splitting embedded objects from the main document, the ERD drawn with traditional tools does not preserve the indentation of JSON that would make it easy to read.

Clarity of complex models

Take a look at an example of the structure of a real document from a real customer (with some field names obfuscated on purpose...)
Complex JSON document

The ER rendering of such a document by a traditional ER tool would result in so many boxes that it becomes nearly impossible to work with.  And that’s with a single document.  Imagine what an ERD would look like for an application comprised of dozens of such collections.

Meaning of relationship lines

As yet another consequence of splitting embedded objects from the main document, the ERD drawn with traditional tools displays relationship lines of different nature:
  • Relationships resulting from the embedding of objects
  • Traditional foreign key relationships [even though we are dealing with so-called ‘non-relational’ DBs, there are often implicit relationships in NoSQL data]
This makes for a confusing picture as true foreign key relationships are hard to distinguish from embedding relationships (even though there can be dashed and solid lines.)

All this does not leave much room for a useful 3rd type of relationships: those issued from denormalization (i.e.; redundancy of data which is useful in NoSQL to improve the read performance of the database.)

Polymorphism

One of the great features of JSON as applicable to NoSQL and Big Data, is the ability to deal with evolving and flexible schemas, both at the level of the general document structure, and at the level of the type of a single field.  This is known as "schema combination", and can be represented in JSON Schema with the use of subschemas and the keywords: anyOf, allOf, oneOf, not.

Let’s take the example of a field that evolves from being just a string type to becoming a sub-document, or with the co-existence of both field types.  Traditional ER tools have a hard time dealing graphically with subschemas (let's be frank, they're simply unable to deal with it...), whereas with Hackolade:
Polymorphism in 2 Hackolade views


Conclusion

Besides the above demonstration, Hackolade has many other advantages.  For example, reverse-engineering is done through a truly native access to the NoSQL database, not via a "native" 3rd-party connector (is that not a contradiction in terms?...)  Hackolade provides useful developer aids such as the ability to generate sample documents and forward-engineering scripts specific to each supported NoSQL database vendors.  And Hackolade supports other NoSQL vendors than just MongoDB: DynamoDB, Couchbase, Cosmos DB, Elasticsearch, Apache HBase, Cassandra, Google Firebase and Firestore, with many others coming up.

Data is a corporate asset, and insights on the data is even more strategic.  Sometimes overlooked as a best practice, data modeling is critical to understanding data, its interrelationships, and its rules. 

Hackolade lets you harness the power and flexibility of dynamic schemas.  It provides a map for applications, a way to engage the conversation between project stakeholders around a picture.  Proper data modeling collaboration between analysts, architects, designers, developers, and DBAs will increase data agility, help get to market faster, increase quality, lower costs, and lower risks.