Complex Queries

Tutorial 2 of 4

Introduction

Goal of the Tutorial

This tutorial is aimed at teaching you how to create and understand complex queries in MongoDB. Queries are an essential part of every database system, and MongoDB is no different. Understanding how to create complex queries will help you manipulate and extract the data stored in your MongoDB collections efficiently.

What You'll Learn

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to:

  • Understand how to use different MongoDB query operators.
  • Construct complex queries to extract, filter and manipulate data.
  • Understand how to implement these queries in your applications.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you should have:

  • Basic understanding of MongoDB.
  • MongoDB installed on your machine.
  • Basic knowledge of JavaScript as MongoDB's shell commands are JavaScript-based.

Step-by-Step Guide

MongoDB provides a rich set of query operators that we can use to interact with the data. These operators can be categorized into:

  • Comparison Operators
  • Logical Operators
  • Element Operators
  • Evaluation Operators
  • Array Operators
  • Bitwise Operators

The following are examples of how to use some of these operators.

Using the $eq Operator

The $eq operator matches documents where the value of a field equals the specified value.

Example:

db.collection.find( { qty: { $eq: 20 } } )

This will return all documents in the collection where the qty field equals 20.

Code Examples

Using the $or Operator

The $or operator performs a logical OR operation on an array of two or more s and selects the documents that satisfy at least one of the s.

Example:

db.collection.find( { $or: [ { status: "A" }, { qty: { $lt: 30 } } ] } )

This will return all documents in the collection where the status equals "A" or qty is less than 30.

Using the $and Operator

The $and operator performs a logical AND operation on an array of two or more s and selects the documents that satisfy all the s.

Example:

db.collection.find( { $and: [ { status: "A" }, { qty: { $lt: 30 } } ] } )

This will return all documents in the collection where the status equals "A" and qty is less than 30.

Summary

In this tutorial, we've learned how to construct complex queries using MongoDB's query operators. We've looked at how to use comparison operators, logical operators, and element operators.

To further your learning, you can explore other operators provided by MongoDB such as evaluation operators, array operators, and bitwise operators.

Practice Exercises

To reinforce what you've learned, try out the following exercises:

  1. Write a query to find all documents in a collection where the status is either "A" or "D", and the qty is less than 30.
  2. Write a query to find all documents in a collection where the status is "A" and the qty is either 20 or 50.

Solutions

  1. db.collection.find( { $and: [ { $or: [ { status: "A" }, { status: "D" } ] }, { qty: { $lt: 30 } } ] } )
  2. db.collection.find( { $and: [ { status: "A" }, { $or: [ { qty: 20 }, { qty: 50 } ] } ] } )

Remember, the best way to learn is by doing. So, keep practicing until you feel comfortable with MongoDB queries.