Last week I posted a challenge about ordering fabric for a bunch of different flags, which can be conveniently solved with the MongoDB aggregation framework. Did you figure out the answer?

So we have a bunch of these flag orders for different countries:

{
	"_id" : ObjectId("52a71923cd4dd732cd060204"),
	"country" : "Norway",
	"colors" : [
		{
			"color" : "red",
			"fabric_units" : 3
		},
		{
			"color" : "blue",
			"fabric_units" : 2
		},
		{
			"color" : "white",
			"fabric_units" : 1
		}
	],
	"num_flags" : 2
}

And to calculate how much fabric we need of each color:

> db.flags.aggregate( [ 
    { $unwind : "$colors" }, 
    { $group : { _id : "$colors.color", fabric_units : 
               { $sum : { $multiply : [ "$colors.fabric_units", "$num_flags" ] } } } } ] ) 

{
	"result" : [
		{
			"_id" : "red",
			"fabric_units" : 8
		},
		{
			"_id" : "yellow",
			"fabric_units" : 3
		},
		{
			"_id" : "white",
			"fabric_units" : 14
		},
		{
			"_id" : "blue",
			"fabric_units" : 17
		}
	],
	"ok" : 1
}

Elegant, isn't it? As no RDBMS supports nested structures like these, and no NoSQL database really has similar aggregation functionality (that I know of), this is really cool and unique stuff you can do!

In the meantime, my collague John Page has posted a few lines of JavaScript to generate a Mandelbrot fractal with the MongoDB aggregation framework. (He also won the title of our team's biggest geek for 2013.) I suppose that is to say Merry Christmas to all you MongoDB hipsters out there, and see you next year!