I am breaking my mind up thinking about a good document structure for handling a message app.
I basically need three (or four) types of objects:
My idea was to embed the contacts into the user document and to embed the messages in a conversation document:
1. User
{
username: 'dev.puS',
usernameCanonical: 'dev.pus', // used for unique constraints
email: '[email protected],
emailCanonical: '[email protected],
salt: 'some hash',
password: 'hash with salt',
logs: { last_login: 12.06.2008, last_password_reset: 04.03.2007 },
state: { online: true, available: false },
contacts: [ user_id1, user_id2, user_id3 ]
}
2. Conversation
{
members: [ user_id1, user_id2 ],
messages: [
{ author: user_2, body: 'Hi what's up' },
{ author: user_1, body: 'Nothing out here :(' },
{ author: user_2, body: 'Whanna ask some question on stackoverflow' },
{ author: user_1, body: 'Okay, lets go' }
]
}
What do you think about this schema?
I think it would be better to keep them seperated (so each document for it's own) because each document has different update frequency. But I really don't have any experience about it so it would be good to hear some advices :)
Regards
I see that this question is old, but for anyone interested, a similar question was asked and one answer looks viable https://stackoverflow.com/a/30830429/132610
Conversation : {
id: 123,
members: [ user_id1, user_id2 ]
}
Message { conversationId: 123, author: user_2, body: 'Hi what's up' }
Message { conversationId: 123, author: user_1, body: 'Whanna ask some question on stackoverflow' }
1) Scalability: MongoDB scales well with very large collection. Billions of messages per collection. There is a technique called sharding that can allow you to split larger collection to multiple nodes.
2) Reading. Since MongoDB has indexing mechanisms, reads are comparable to any fine-tuned database engine. So reading will not be an issue. Especially, when a conversation(group|room) has fewer participants, for example two people messaging each other.