Converting Django project from MySQL to Mongo, any major pitfalls?

Question

I want to try Mongodb w/ mongoengine. I'm new to Django and databases and I'm having a fit with Foreign Keys, Joins, Circular Imports (you name it). I know I could eventually work through these issues but Mongo just seems like a simpler solution for what I am doing. My question is I'm using a lot of pluggable apps (Imagekit, Haystack, Registration, etc) and wanted to know if these apps will continue to work if I make the switch. Are there any known headaches that I will encounter, if so I might just keep banging my head with MySQL.

Answer 1

There's no reason why you can't use one of the standard RDBMSs for all the standard Django apps, and then Mongo for your app. You'll just have to replace all the standard ways of processing things from the Django ORM with doing it the Mongo way.

So you can keep urls.py and its neat pattern matching, views will still get parameters, and templates can still take objects.

You'll lose querysets because I suspect they are too closely tied to the RDBMS models - but they are just lazily evaluated lists really. Just ignore the Django docs on writing models.py and code up your database business logic in a Mongo paradigm.

Oh, and you won't have the Django Admin interface for easy access to your data.

Answer 2

You might want to check out django-nonrel, which is a young but promising attempt at a NoSQL backend for Django. Documentation is lacking at the moment, but it works great if you just work it out.