I really like using MongoDB and Mongoid, but a while back I ran into some shortcomings with querying timestamps. The problem was that I wanted to query only part of a timestamp, such as the day, week or year. So for example, let's say we need to find all users that signed up on a Wednesday.

In SQL there are date functions that let you to parse dates inside your query (although they seem to vary between engines). So in Postgres, you could do something like this:

There are several cases in which it might make sense to tailor your app's content based on a user's physical location. But asking them directly is a bit of a pain. Luckily, it's extremely simple to find a user's location knowing only something you will always know about a visitor: their IP address. Today I'll walk you through how to use IPs to geolocate your visitors in a Rails application using Geokit and MongoDB's geospatial indexing with MongoMapper.

10gen, the purveyors of everyone's favorite document-oriented database MongoDB, recently held a gathering of developers, sysadmins, devops, and other parties interested in MongoDB in D.C. appropriately named MongoDC. I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak on how we use MongoDB here at Intridea, so I delivered a little treatise on one of our client projects. Although we've moved most of the project operations off of MongoDB now for a few reasons, working with such a deep and wide dataset was an interesting experience that a lot of people don't encounter when using document-oriented databases.