Minimongo is an extremely lightweight, schemaless ORM for Python & MongoDB.
- Minimongo delegates queries directly to pymongo.
- Minimongo is schemaless. (No Schema validation at all.)
- Minimongo manages database connections for you.
- Minimongo offers many other conveniences on top of pymongo, but preserves the raw spirit and feel of pymongo.
I’ve been using MongoDB for my latest projects, and I absolutely love it, and the freedom of application design it inspires.
But, I wasn’t happy with the “ORM” solutions that currently existed for MongoDB. I investigated MongoEngine and MongoKit, but they both impart way too much structure for my tastes, and operate too much like a traditional SQL ORM. Because I’m developing from scratch, I have no need for a complex ORM. In addition, they both have Schema validation, which is something that I’m trying to avoid in my development, since I’m bringing in data from many external APIs into a single object, and I know I’m going to be extending these in the future (more sources, more unstructured data).
So, I decided to write my own ORM for Python & MongoDB. ORM is too strong of a word, since my goals were:
- Keep the native pymongo query syntax.
- No schema validation.
- Map dict-based results from pymongo in a Python object.
- Provide a direct interface layer to pymongo.
- Manage pymongo connections automatically.
- Provide helper functions for DBRef usage.
- Provide helper functions for managing database & collection names.
If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, please check out my Minimongo repository and let me know what you think.