PyMongo Monday - Episode 4 - Update

This is part 4 of PyMongo Monday. Previously we have covered:

• EP1 - Setting up your MongoDB Environment
• EP2 - Create - the C in CRUD
• EP3 - Read - the R in CRUD

We are now into Update, the U in CRUD. The key aspect of update is the ability to change a document in place. In order for this to happen we must have some way to select the document and change parts of that document. In the pymongo driver this is achieved with two functions:

• update_one
• update_many

Each update operation can take a range of update operators that define how we can mutate a document during update.

Lets get a copy of the zipcode database hosted on MongoDB Atlas. As our copy hosted in Atlas is not writable we can't test update directly on it.

However, we can create a local copy with this simple script:

 $ mongodump --host demodata-shard-0/demodata-shard-00-00-rgl39.mongodb.net:27017,demodata-shard-00-01-rgl39.mongodb.net:27017,demodata-shard-00-02-rgl39.mongodb.net:27017 --ssl --username readonly --password readonly --authenticationDatabase admin --db demo
2018-10-22T01:18:35.330+0100    writing demo.zipcodes to
2018-10-22T01:18:36.097+0100    done dumping demo.zipcodes (29353 documents)

This will create a backup of the data in a dump directory in the current working directory.

to restore the data to a local mongod make sure you are running mongod locally and just run mongorestore in the same directory as you ran mongodump.

$ mongorestore
2018-10-22T01:19:19.064+0100    using default 'dump' directory
2018-10-22T01:19:19.064+0100    preparing collections to restore from
2018-10-22T01:19:19.066+0100    reading metadata for demo.zipcodes from dump/demo/zipcodes.metadata.json
2018-10-22T01:19:19.211+0100    restoring demo.zipcodes from dump/demo/zipcodes.bson
2018-10-22T01:19:19.943+0100    restoring indexes for collection demo.zipcodes from metadata
2018-10-22T01:19:20.364+0100    finished restoring demo.zipcodes (29353 documents)
2018-10-22T01:19:20.364+0100    done

You will now have a demo database on your local mongod with a single collection called zipcodes.

$ python
Python 3.6.5 (v3.6.5:f59c0932b4, Mar 28 2018, 03:03:55)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pymongo
>>> client = pymongo.MongoClient()
>>> database=client['demo']
>>> zipcodes=database["zipcodes"]
>>> zipcodes.find_one()
{'_id': '01001', 'city': 'AGAWAM', 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206], 'pop': 15338, 'state': 'MA'}
>>>
>

Each document in this database has the same format:

{
 '_id': '01001',                  # ZIP code
 'city': 'AGAWAM',                # City name
 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206],  # Geo Spatial Coordinates
 'pop': 15338,                    # Population of within zip code        
 'state': 'MA',                   # Two letter state code (MA = Massachusetts)
}

Let's say we want to change the population to reflect the most current value. Today the population of 01001 is approximately 16769. To change the value we would execute the following update.

>>> zipcodes.update( {"_id" : "01001"}, {"$set" : { "pop" : 16769}})
{'n': 1, 'nModified': 1, 'ok': 1.0, 'updatedExisting': True}
>>> zipcodes.find_one({"_id" : "01001"})
{'_id': '01001', 'city': 'AGAWAM', 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206], 'pop': 16769, 'state': 'MA'}
>>>

Here we see the $set operator in action. The $set operator will set a field to a new value or create that field if it doesn't exist in the document. We add a new field by doing:

>>> zipcodes.update_one( {"_id" : "01001"}, {"$set" : { "population_record" : []}})
<pymongo.results.UpdateResult object at 0x1042dc488>
>>> zipcodes.find_one({"_id" : "01001"})
{'_id': '01001', 'city': 'AGAWAM', 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206], 'pop': 16769, 'state': 'MA', 'population_record': []}
>>>

Here we are adding a new field called population_record. This field is an array field and has been set to the empty array for now. Now we can update the array with a history of the population for the ZIP Code area.

>>> zipcodes.update_one({"_id" : "01001"}, { "$push" : { "population_record" : { "pop" : 15338, "timestamp": None }}})
<pymongo.results.UpdateResult object at 0x106c210c8>
>>> zipcodes.find_one({"_id" : "01001"})
{'_id': '01001', 'city': 'AGAWAM', 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206], 'pop': 16769, 'state': 'MA', 'population_record': [{'pop': 15338, 'timestamp': None}]}
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> zipcodes.update_one({"_id" : "01001"}, { "$push" : { "population_record" : { "pop" : 16769, "timestamp": datetime.utcnow() }}})
<pymongo.results.UpdateResult object at 0x106c21908>
>>> zipcodes.find_one({"_id" : "01001"})                                                                 
{'_id': '01001', 'city': 'AGAWAM', 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206], 'pop': 16769, 'state': 'MA', 'population_record': [{'pop': 15338, 'timestamp': None}, {'pop': 16769, 'timestamp': datetime.datetime(2018, 10, 22, 11, 37, 5, 60000)}]}
>>> x=zipcodes.find_one({"_id" : "01001"})
>>> x
{'_id': '01001', 'city': 'AGAWAM', 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206], 'pop': 16769, 'state': 'MA', 'population_record': [{'pop': 15338, 'timestamp': None}, {'pop': 16769, 'timestamp': datetime.datetime(2018, 10, 22, 11, 37, 5, 60000)}]}
>>> import pprint
>>> pprint.pprint(x)
{'_id': '01001',
 'city': 'AGAWAM',
 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206],
 'pop': 16769,
 'population_record': [{'pop': 15338, 'timestamp': None},
                       {'pop': 16769,
                        'timestamp': datetime.datetime(2018, 10, 22, 11, 37, 5, 60000)}],
 'state': 'MA'}
>>>

Here we have appended two documents to the array so that we have a history of the changes in population. The original value of 15338 was captured at an unknown time in the past so we set that timestamp to None. We updated the other value today so we can set that timestamp to the current time. In both cases we use the $push operator to push new elements onto the end of the array population_record.

You can see how we use pprint to produce the output in a slightly more readable format.

If we want to apply updates to more than one record we use update_many to apply changes to more than one document. Now if the filter applies to more than one document the changes will be applied to each document. So imagine we wanted to add the city sales tax to each city. First, we want to add the city sales tax to all the ZIP Code regions in New York.

>>> zipcodes.update_many( {'city': "NEW YORK"}, { "$set" : { "sales tax" : 4.5 }})
<pymongo.results.UpdateResult object at 0x1042dcd88>
>>> zipcodes.find( {"city": "NEW YORK"})
<pymongo.cursor.Cursor object at 0x101e09410>
>>> cursor=zipcodes.find( {"city": "NEW YORK"})
>>> cursor.next()
{u'city': u'NEW YORK', u'loc': [-73.996705, 40.74838], u'sales tax': 4.5, u'state': u'NY', u'pop': 18913, u'_id': u'10001'}
>>> cursor.next()
{u'city': u'NEW YORK', u'loc': [-73.987681, 40.715231], u'sales tax': 4.5, u'state': u'NY', u'pop': 84143, u'_id': u'10002'}
>>> cursor.next()
{u'city': u'NEW YORK', u'loc': [-73.989223, 40.731253], u'sales tax': 4.5, u'state': u'NY', u'pop': 51224, u'_id': u'10003'}
>>>

The final kind of update operation we want to talk about is upsert. We can add the upsert flag to any update operation to do an insert of the target document even when it doesn't match. When is this useful?

Imagine we have a read-only collection of ZIP Code data and we want to create a new collection (call it zipcodes_new) that contains updates to the ZIP Codes that contain changes in population.

As we collect new population stats ZIP Code by ZIP Code we want to update the zipcodes_new collection with new documents containing the updated ZIP Code data. In order to simplify this process we can do the updates as an upsert.

Below is a fragment of code from update_population.py

zip_doc = zipcodes.find_one({"_id": args.zipcode})
zip_doc["pop"] = {"pop": args.pop, "timestamp": args.date}
zipcodes_new.update({"_id":args.zipcode}, zip_doc, upsert=True)
print("New zipcode data: " + zip_doc["_id"])
pprint.pprint(zip_doc)

The upsert=True flag ensures that if we don't match the initial clause {"_id":args.zipcode} we will still insert the zip_doc doc. This is a common pattern for upsert usage: Initially we insert based on a unique key. As the the number of inserts grows the likelihood that we will be updating an existing key as opposed to inserting a new key grows. the upsert=True flag allows us to handle both situations in a single update statement.

There is a lot more to update and I will return to update later in the series. For now just remember that update is generally used for mutating existing documents using a range of update operators.

Next time we will complete our first pass over CRUD operations with the final function, delete.