Flamongo

A tool that helps you find the most efficient indexes for your MongoDB collections

What does Flamongo do?

If you want to figure out how to make your MongoDB queries more performant by finding the best indexes, you've come to the right place.

flamongo explain provides you with helpful, human-readable stats on how a your MongoDB indexes perform for your queries.

flamongo best-index finds the best MongoDB index for each of your queries.

• Flamongo will pump a test collection full of stub data
• Depending on the command you're running, flamongo will either create the indexes you've specified or create every possible index in turn
• Run your queries against the test collection
• Print out useful information and statistics, which will help you decide which indexes are best for your needs

Install

$ npm install -g flamongo

API

explain

Explain how your queries perform against the provided indexes.

$ flamongo explain input.json

Where input.json looks something like:

{
  "indexKeys": [
    { "name.first": 1 },
    { "birthday": 1 }
  ],
  "queries": [
    { "name.first": "Richard" },
    { "name.first": "John", "vegan": false, "name.last": { "$nin": ["Smith"] } }
  ],
  "schema": {
    "name": {
      "first": "first",
      "last": "last"
    },
    "vegan": "bool",
    "birthday": "date",
    "friends": [{
      "name": {
        "first": "first",
        "last": "last"
      }
    }]
  }
}

Example output:

Connection open
Inserting 90000 random documents
Created 3 indexes
 
Results for query:
{"name.first":"Richard"}
 
The query took 1 milliseconds to run and returned 167 documents.
167 keys and 167 documents were examined.
 
Stages:
 
2. Retrieve documents (FETCH):
Took around 10  milliseconds and returned 167 documents
Examined 167 documents
 
1. Scan index keys (IXSCAN):
Took around 10  milliseconds and returned 167 documents
Examined 167 keys on index name.first_1_vegan_1 in a forward direction
 
 
Results for query:
{"name.first":"John","vegan":false,"name.last":{"$nin":["Smith"]}}
 
The query took 2 milliseconds to run and returned 83 documents.
83 keys and 83 documents were examined.
 
Stages:
 
2. Retrieve documents (FETCH):
Took around 0  milliseconds and returned 83 documents
Examined 83 documents, using filter {"$not":{"name.last":{"$in":["Smith"]}}}
 
1. Scan index keys (IXSCAN):
Took around 0  milliseconds and returned 83 documents
Examined 83 keys on index name.first_1_vegan_1 in a forward direction

Programmatic API

const flamongo = require('flamongo');
flamongo.explain(input, options, /* optional logging function */)
  .then((results) => { /* use results */ });

best-index

Find the fastest index based on your queries and data.

$ flamongo best-index input.json

Where input.json looks something like:

{
  "queries": [
    { "name.first": "Richard", "vegan": true },
    { "name.first": "John", "vegan": false, "name.last": { "$nin": ["Smith"] } }
  ],
  "schema": {
    "name": {
      "first": "first",
      "last": "last"
    },
    "vegan": "bool",
    "birthday": "date",
    "friends": [{
      "name": {
        "first": "first",
        "last": "last"
      }
    }]
  }
}

Example output:

Connection open
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Running the following query against 4 indexes to find the best index:
{"name.first":"Richard","vegan":true}
 
The best index based on your input appears to be vegan_1_name.first_1, which took 0 milliseconds. (102 documents were returned.)
You can create the index using this key: {"vegan":1,"name.first":1}
 
Rank  |  Index                 |  Time (ms)  |  Documents examined  |  Keys examined
1     |  vegan_1_name.first_1  |  0          |  102                 |  102
2     |  name.first_1_vegan_1  |  1          |  102                 |  102
3     |  name.first_1          |  1          |  182                 |  182
4     |  vegan_1               |  53         |  45141               |  45141
 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Running the following query against 15 indexes to find the best index:
{"name.first":"John","vegan":false,"name.last":{"$nin":["Smith"]}}
 
The best index based on your input appears to be vegan_1_name.first_1, which took 1 milliseconds. (86 documents were returned.)
You can create the index using this key: {"vegan":1,"name.first":1}
 
Rank  |  Index                             |  Time (ms)  |  Documents examined  |  Keys examined
1     |  vegan_1_name.first_1              |  1          |  86                  |  86
2     |  name.first_1_vegan_1_name.last_1  |  1          |  86                  |  87
3     |  name.first_1                      |  1          |  161                 |  161
4     |  name.first_1_name.last_1          |  1          |  161                 |  162
5     |  name.last_1_name.first_1          |  9          |  161                 |  1160
6     |  name.first_1_vegan_1              |  11         |  86                  |  86
7     |  vegan_1                           |  52         |  44859               |  44859
8     |  vegan_1_name.last_1               |  91         |  44761               |  44763
9     |  name.last_1_vegan_1               |  94         |  44761               |  45261
10    |  name.last_1                       |  164        |  89811               |  89812

Alias

flamongo best

Programmatic API

const flamongo = require('flamongo');
flamongo.bestIndex(input, options, /* optional logging function */)
  .then((results) => { /* use results */ });

Performance

flamongo is not yet clever enough to guess which indexes to try first, so it just tries every possible one. Note that due to the nature of combinatorics, queries with many search terms will result in a huge number of permutations. 4 search terms will test 64 indexes, which will be slow but fine. 5 terms will need to check 325 indexes, which is a really long wait. Anything more than that is not worth doing.

Input format

• queries: An array of queries to run against your Mongo collection. Flamongo will output stats for each one in turn.
• schema: A schema that Flamongo will use to fill a test collection with data. The type descriptions map to Chance.js generators. Optional if the preserveData option is specified (see below).
• indexKeys: An array of indexes to create. Only used for flamongo explain.

If you need to do something more complex, you can also specify a plain .js file that exports (i.e. module.exports =) a similar object.

Schema

The schema flamongo uses (via randoc) loosely maps to functions offered by Chance.js, with a few additional options. Here's an example schema that showcases some of the available functionality

schema: {
  widget: {
    name: 'string',
    inventor: 'name',
    dateObtained: 'date',
    discountable: 'bool',
    warehouseId: {
      _type: 'enum',
      options: [543, 999, 1232, 110],
    },
    deleted: {
      _type: 'bool',
      args: {
        likelihood: 5,
      },
    },
    outOfStock: {
      _type: 'bool',
      args: {
        likelihood: 10,
      },
    },
  },
  status: {
    _type: 'enum',
    options: ['new', 'active', 'cancelled', ''],
  },
},

Options

Option	Description	Default
url	URL of Mongo server. Note that Flamongo is meant for testing. See the Mongo Connection String docs for the URL format. By default, Flamongo is destructive. Use preserveData and preserveIndexes and be careful if you're planning to point it at your production server.	mongodb://localhost:27017
databaseName	Name of database to use	test_indexes_db
collectionName	Name of collection to use	test_indexes_collection
preserveData	When true, Flamongo will not insert or remove data	false
preserveIndexes	When true, Flamongo will not create or drop indexes. Note that this option will not be honoured by flamongo best-index, which will always drop and create indexes.	false
numberOfRecords	Number of stub records to insert, using the specified schema	90000
verbose	Print out the full output of MongoDB's explain results	false

You can pass options on the command line. Example: flamongo explain --numberOfRecords 240000 --preserveData true flamongo.json

Further reading

Reading the Mongo Docs on Index Strategies will help you understand what factors influence how performant an index is. Some queries will actually be faster without any indexes!

Helpful queries

Here are some queries you can run against your collection to see how your indexes are being used:

• db.collection.aggregate( [ { $indexStats: { } } ] ) - usage info for each index
• db.collection.stats().indexSizes - memory size of each index
• db.collection.totalIndexSize() - total memory used by indexes

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