Here at Swiftype, we use both MongoDB and MySQL to store some of our core metadata — not search indexes themselves, but users, accounts, search engines, and so on. As we’ve migrated data from MongoDB to MySQL, we’ve found ourselves needing to store the primary keys of MongoDB documents in MySQL.

While it’s possible to use more-or-less arbitrary data in MongoDB as your _id, very, very frequently you will simply use MongoDB’s built-in ObjectId type. This is a data type similar in concept to a UUID; it can be generated on any machine at any time, and the chance it will be globally-unique is still extremely high. Some relational databases offer native support for UUIDs; we thought, why shouldn’t we teach Rails how to get as close to that ideal as possible with ObjectIds, too?

The result has been our objectid_columns RubyGem, which we are proud to release as open source under the MIT license. Using ObjectIdColumns, you can store MongoDB ObjectId values as a CHAR(24) or VARCHAR(24) (which stores the hexadecimal representation of the ObjectId in your database), or as a BINARY(12), which stores an efficient-as-possible binary representation of the ObjectId value in your database.

No matter how you choose to store this data, it’s automatically exposed from your ActiveRecord models as an instance of the bson gem’s BSON::ObjectId class, or the moped gem’s Moped::BSON::ObjectId class. (ObjectIdColumns is compatible with both equally; the two are extremely similar.)

my_model = MyModel.find(...)
my_model.my_oid # => BSON::ObjectId('52eab2cf78161f1314000001')

You can assign values as an instance of either of these classes, or as a String representation of an ObjectId — in either hex or pure-binary forms — and it will automatically translate for you:

my_model.my_oid = BSON::ObjectId.new # OK
my_model.my_oid = "52eab32878161f1314000002" # OK
my_model.my_oid = "R\xEA\xB2\xCFx\x16\x1F\x13\x14\x00\x00\x01" # OK

ObjectIdColumns even transparently supports queries; the following will all “just work”:

MyModel.where(:my_oid => BSON::ObjectId('52eab2cf78161f1314000001'))
MyModel.where(:my_oid => '52eab2cf78161f1314000001')
MyModel.where(:my_oid => 'R\xEA\xB2\xCFx\x16\x1F\x13\x14\x00\x00\x01'))

Enjoy! Head on over to the objectid_columns GitHub page for more details, or just drop gem ‘objectid_columns’in your Gemfile and go for it!

If you enjoyed the tips in this tutorial, make sure to bookmark our blog and subscribe for more announcements like our new Swiftype Ruby Gem.

Swiftype site search was featured as LeanStack’s service of the week. As part of that I wrote a guest blog post about how Swiftype uses cloud services to run our business.

“Implementing a better product with less hassle is really only half the advantage of using a service like ours. The other half — which doesn’t seem to get as much marketing play — is that by leveraging the product of a company dedicated to a single, specific technology, you realize the gains of having a full-time team of domain experts dedicated to improving your search feature, without assuming any of the cost. At Swiftype we spend all of our time thinking about, developing, and iterating on search, and every time we ship an improvement, all of our customers reap the benefits instantly. Our experience has shown that at most companies it can be a full-time job just maintaining an internal search system, much less improving it over time. When search isn’t a core competency of your company, we believe you’re better off letting us take care of the details. And of course the same philosophy applies to our company as well, which is why we leverage so many existing cloud-based services in our daily operations. Anywhere that we can save time and resources using a product that another company focuses their full effort on delivering is a win for us, because it allows us to spend our resources on what we do best — building great search software.”

Read the post to learn more about our cloud stack and the services we use.

If you liked this post, please remember to bookmark our blog and subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll be posting announcements and more from the Swiftype team, as well as our friends and partners who power their search with Swiftype, such as Laughing Squid.

At Swiftype we’re always working on new ways to improve the quality of the crawl of your website, and today we’re announcing Swiftype crawler support for the Sitemap.xml protocol.

The Sitemap.xml protocol is a well-documented and widely implemented standard for specifying exactly which set of URLs you would like web crawlers to index on your website, and if your website supplies a sitemap.xml file to our crawler we will dutifully follow your specifications as our crawler builds a search index for your website.

If you aren’t familiar with Sitemap.xml files, we’ll take you through a quick tutorial here, and there is additional information in our documentation section as well as the official protocol page.

To get started, create a simple sitemap.xml file. An example sitemap.xml that specifies 3 URLs might look as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/faq/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/about/</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

Next, you’ll put the sitemap.xml file on your web server at a location that is accessible by our crawler. Many sites place the sitemap at the root of the domain (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), but any location is fine. Whatever location you choose, you should specify the location in your Robots.txt file as follows:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If you’re unfamiliar with the Robots.txt file, you can find more information at the official Web Robots page.

Once your robots.txt file is updated and your sitemap.xml file has been uploaded you’re finished. The next time the Swiftype crawler visits your website we’ll recognize your sitemap.xml file follow the links you specify.

As always, if you’re having trouble or want more information, feel free to get in touch. Also, don’t forget to follow the blog so you don’t miss out on great content from our friends like Bob Hiler from Mixergy.