HN Explorer

Ask HN: How to Visualise MongoDB?

8 points by utkarsh_apoorva ↗ HN
Hey HN, Is there a tool that lets you visualise your database in browser, in an easy way.

I have tried Metabase, Redash, Google DataStudio - all pretty complex tools.

I am an indie hacker, and have my product data in Mongo. Right now, I check it out in terminal. It would be good to have a visualisation tool to do that for me.

My criteria:

1. Simple to use 2. Should not keep crashing (Metabase for Mac sucks)

If nothing like this exists, do you think I should build one and open source it?

14 comments

[ 8.4 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] thread
utkarsh_apoorva
OP here. Thanks for the upvotes. Some directions too please :-)
davismwfl
Have you looked at DataGrip from JetBrains or RoboMongo?

I have used both of those as DB tools. Currently I have no Mongo databases and only use DataGrip, but I understand it supports Mongo pretty well and it is a decent tool. DataGrip isn't free but does have a free trial. Also, I believe there are a couple of different plug-ins for Visual Studio code that work with Mongo, but I don't use it so can't say how well etc.

* edit, sorry, just realized you said in browser, none of my suggestions are in-browser.

utkarsh_apoorva
That's cool actually. Not being in the browser is not a dealbreaker. I need something simple, not clunky, preferably free or low subscription cost. Checking out Robomongo as I write this.

EDIT: neither of these can be used for BI like visualisations, can they?

davismwfl
No RoboMongo (at least last I knew) is only for data access, not BI visualization. Honestly, I am not aware of any tools that do BI visualization directly from Mongo, there are plenty for SQL of course.

In my opinion/experience, Mongo isn't really a good generic BI data warehouse/lake etc, so it probably will be hard to find generic tooling around that specific problem domain using Mongo without custom writing your own map-reduce and building your own visualizations with like highcharts/syncfusion/d3 etc.

thiht
Robo3T (formerly RoboMongo) does just this.
nocubicles
I don't think its possible to visualize Mongo data out of the box due to the fact its schemaless. They have this product https://docs.mongodb.com/bi-connector/master/ which I have not used but it looks something that would be able to solve the issue? I have tried also Metabase with Mongo and it works to some extent but when I tried the queries didn't work etc.

I think your best option would be to custom build some dashboards using some HTML and JS and some API that serialializes your data or if you need BI tool then either check out their bi-connector or maybe build some ETL workflow and save your data in Bigquery or something similar. From there it would be easy to use Metabase or something else to visualize your data.

utkarsh_apoorva
I guess it will ultimately boil down to an ETL workflow and a BI tool. Most of my requirements are fairly simple so I did not want to put up with the clunkiness of a complex software.

>Metabase works to some extent

.. and that was enough actually. I would have continued with it if it did not crash on me all the time.

seektable
Take a look to https://www.seektable.com, it has native connector for MongoDB. Both cloud & self-hosted versions are available; paid subscriptions are not needed for personal/individual usage.
tedmiston
Are you looking for a database GUI tool or a visual graph of the data in your Mongo db?

For the former, Robo 3T, as mentioned in sibling threads is probably the most popular free option.

For the latter, I haven't seen much but it looks like Mongo themselves have a tool called MongoDB Charts [1] for this.

[1]: https://www.mongodb.com/products/charts

utkarsh_apoorva
The latter. MongoDB Charts comes the closest to what I need.