Author: Nic Raboy

Using Dot Notation to Query Nested Fields in MongoDB

April 28, 2026 Nic Raboy

If you're just starting to dabble with MongoDB, you've probably come to a point where your documents are looking a little complex. These documents might have gone from flat, relational-looking pieces of data to something with nested objects, nested arrays, and maybe even four or five more levels of nesting. So how do you query this data when it is a few layers deep?

In this short tutorial, we're going to look at dot notation within MongoDB and see how we can very quickly and easily filter our documents based on data that contains certain values in the nested fields.

Build a Movie Watchlist with Node.js, TypeScript, and MongoDB

April 13, 2026 Nic Raboy

Almost every modern web application will need a REST API for a client to talk to, and in almost every scenario, that client is going to expect JSON. The best developer experience is a stack where you can stay in JSON-shaped data end to end, without awkward transformations in the middle.

Take MongoDB, Express Framework, and Node.js as an example.

Express receives HTTP requests and sends responses. MongoDB sits in the middle and stores documents. The client can send JSON to your routes, your routes can send documents to MongoDB, and MongoDB can hand BSON back that maps naturally to what you serialize in the response. That works well because MongoDB is a document database. When you also want text search over fields like title and plot, MongoDB Search gives you a $search stage in an aggregation pipeline on the same cluster, so you are not bolting on a separate search system just to power a search box.

In this tutorial, we'll see how to build a small movie watchlist API using TypeScript and MongoDB. We'll explore a few different schema design opportunities and make use of MongoDB Search for full-text search.

Easy Automated Docker Volume Backups That Are Database Friendly

May 10, 2025 Nic Raboy

I recently picked up a Beelink EQR6 Mini PC to reduce some of the Docker stress on my aging Synology NAS. Since my Synology used the Btrfs filesystem, I never had to worry about file locks and corruption during a backup because that particular file system used copy-on-write (CoW). However, since I decided to use Ubuntu Server on my Mini PC and neglected choosing which filesystem I wanted to use, I ended up with ext4.

Here's the problem though.

The ext4 filesystem does not support copy-on-write. This means that if I tried to make backups of my Docker volumes, I'd run the risk of file corruption if those files were in use at the time of backup. This is particularly more of a problem with Docker volumes that contain SQLite databases with write-ahead log (WAL) or databases in general.

There's good news though! There are a few automated solutions for safe backups of Docker volumes that can be used with minimal effort.

Migrating Your Content Management System (CMS) Assets With MongoDB and Node.js

May 9, 2025 Nic Raboy

Content platforms evolve as business strategies shift. At MongoDB, we embraced external publishing platforms like Dev.to, Medium, The Polyglot Developer, etc. to better engage developer communities, requiring us to redistribute content while maintaining our existing CMS data in MongoDB.

To support our multi-platform publishing strategy, we created a system to publish content between our MongoDB CMS and external platforms. As a result, we needed to migrate the content we had in our CMS to its new home. The migration process included exporting the written content stored in MongoDB and downloading a copy of the media assets that were stored on third-party servers.

In this tutorial, we'll explore the export process to get the job done with as little friction as possible.

Serverless Development with Kotlin, AWS Lambda, and MongoDB Atlas

August 8, 2023 Nic Raboy

As seen in a previous tutorial, creating a serverless function for AWS Lambda with Java and MongoDB isn't too complicated of a task. In fact, you can get it done with around 35 lines of code!

However, maybe your stack doesn't consist of Java, but instead Kotlin. What needs to be done to use Kotlin for AWS Lambda and MongoDB development? The good news is not much will be different!

In this tutorial, we'll see how to create a simple AWS Lambda function. It will use Kotlin as the programming language and it will use the MongoDB Kotlin driver for interacting with MongoDB.

Serverless Development with AWS Lambda and MongoDB Atlas Using Java

July 23, 2023 Nic Raboy

So you need to build an application that will scale with demand and a database to scale with it? It might make sense to explore serverless functions, like those offered by AWS Lambda, and a cloud database like MongoDB Atlas.

Serverless functions are great because you can implement very specific logic in the form of a function and the infrastructure will scale automatically to meet the demand of your users. This will spare you from having to spend potentially large amounts of money on always on, but not always needed, infrastructure. Pair this with an elastically scalable database like MongoDB Atlas, and you've got an amazing thing in the works.

In this tutorial, we're going to explore how to create a serverless function with AWS Lambda and MongoDB, but we're going to focus on using Java, one of the available AWS Lambda runtimes.

Delivering a Near Real-Time Single View into Operations with a Federated Database

April 17, 2023 Nic Raboy

So the data within your organization spans across multiple databases, database platforms, and even storage types, but you need to bring it together and make sense of the data that's dispersed. This is referred to as a Single View application and it is a common need for many organizations, so you're not alone!

With MongoDB Data Federation, you can seamlessly query, transform, and aggregate your data from one or more locations, such as within a MongoDB database, AWS S3 buckets, and even HTTP API endpoints. In other words, with Data Federation, you can use the MongoDB Query API to work with your data even if it doesn't exist within MongoDB.

What's a scenario where this might make sense?

Let's say you're in the automotive or supply chain industries. You have customer data that might exist within MongoDB, but your parts vendors run their own businesses external to yours. However, there's a need to pair the parts data with transactions for any particular customer. In this scenario, you might want to be able to create queries or views that bring each of these pieces together.

In this tutorial, we're going to see how quick and easy it is to work with MongoDB Data Federation to create custom views that might aid your sales and marketing teams.