Introducing Easier Onboarding and Activation with Connectors

Most of our users are technical. They love writing code, and we love providing API clients in the major programming languages to them (we are currently supporting 10 platforms).

They are doers. They love prototyping. Just like us, they work for startups which need to move fast, and get things done, keeping in mind that done is better than perfect. It is very important that they don’t want to waste time. In this post, I will explain how one would have used our API up to now, and how we introduced SQL and MongoDB connectors for easier onboarding, integration and testing.

Before: The first steps with our API

Up until now, our onboarding process asked you to try the API by uploading your data. We emphasized our documentation, and we made sure our users would not need more than a few minutes to integrate our REST API. Nevertheless, exporting your application’s data to a JSON or CSV file is often more complex than it appears, especially when you have millions of rows – and especially because developers are lazy 🙂 No worries, that’s totally OK. It is something you may not be willing to do, especially just to try a service, so we decided to try something else.

Initial import

90% of our users are using a SQL or MongoDB database. Exporting a table or a collection to a JSON file can be easy if you’re using a framework, for example Ruby on Rails:

File.open("/tmp/export.json", "w") do |f|
  f << MyActiveRecordModel.all.to_json
end

…or more annoying, for example when using PHP without any framework:

mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
$results = array();
$q = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM YourTable");
if ($q) {
  while (($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($q))) {
    array_push($results, $row);
  }
}
$fp = fopen('/tmp/export.json', 'w');
fwrite($fp, json_encode($results));
fclose($fp);

Anyway, in both cases it gets harder if you want to export millions of rows without consuming hundreds GB of RAM. So you will need to use our API clients:

index = Algolia::Index.new "YourIndex"
MyActiveRecordModel.find_in_batches(1000) do |objects|
  index.add_objects(objects)
end
# that's actually what `MyActiveRecordModel.reindex!` does

mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
$limit = 1000;
$start = 0;
$index = $client->initIndex('YourIndexName');
while (true) {
  $q = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM YourTable LIMIT " . $start . "," . $limit);
  $n = 0;
  if ($q) {
    $objects = array();
    while(($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($q))) {
      array_push($objects, $row);
      ++$n;
    }
    $index->addObjects($objects);
  }
  if ($n != $limit) {
    break;
  }
  $start += $n;
}

Incremental updates

Once imported, you will need to go further and keep your DB and our indexes up-to-date. You can either:

• Clear your index and re-import all your records hourly/daily with the previous methods:
  • non-intrusive,
  • not real-time,
  • not durable,
  • need to import your data to a temporary index + replace the original one atomically once imported if you want to keep your service running while re-importing

Or

• Patch your application/website code to replicate every add/delete/update operations to our API:
  • real-time,
  • consistent & durable,
  • a little intrusive to some people, even though it is only a few lines of code (see our documentation)

After: Introducing connectors

Even if we did recommend you to modify your application code to replicate all add/delete/update operations from your DB to our API, this should not be the only option, especially to test Algolia. Users want to be convinced before modifying anything in their production-ready application/website. This is why we are really proud to release 2 open-source connectors: a non-intrusive and efficient way to synchronize your current SQL or MongoDB database with our servers.

SQL connector

title=”Algolia SQL JDBC Connector”>algolia/jdbc-java-connector (MIT license, we love pull-requests :))

The connector starts by enumerating the table and push all matching rows to our server. If you store the last modification date of a row in a field, you can use it in order to send all detected updates every 10 seconds. Every 5 minutes, the connector synchronizes your database with the index by adding the new rows and removing the deleted ones.

jdbc-connector.sh --source "jdbc:mysql://localhost/YourDB"  
  --username mysqlUser --password mysqlPassword             
  --selectQuery "SELECT * FROM YourTable" --primaryField id 
  --updateQuery "SELECT * FROM YourTable WHERE updated_at > _$"
  --updatedAtField updated_at 
  --applicationId YourApplicationId --apiKey YourApiKey --index YourIndexName

If you don’t have an updated_at  field, you can use:

jdbc-connector.sh --source "jdbc:mysql://localhost/YourDB"  
  --username mysqlUser --password mysqlPassword             
  --selectQuery "SELECT * FROM YourTable" --primaryField id 
  --applicationId YourApplicationId --apiKey YourApiKey --index YourIndexName

The full list of features is available on Github (remember, we ♥ feature and pull-requests)!

MongoDB connector

 Github project: algolia/mongo-connector

This connector has been forked from 10gen-lab’s official connector and is based on MongoDB’s operation logs. This means you will need to start your mongod  server specifying a replica set. Basically, you need to start your server with: mongod –replSet REPLICA_SET_IDENTIFIER. Once started, the connector will replicate each addition/deletion/update to our server, sending a batch of operations every 10 seconds.

mongo-connector -m localhost:27017 -n myDb.myCollection 
  -d ./doc_managers/algolia_doc_manager.py              
  -t YourApplicationID:YourApiKey:YourIndex

The full features list is available on Github (we ♥ feature and pull-requests).

Conclusion: Easier Onboarding, Larger Audience!

Helping our users to onboard and try Algolia without writing a single line of code is not only a way to attract more non-technical users; It is also a way to save the time of our technical but overbooked users, allowing them to be convinced without wasting their time before really implementing it.

Those connectors are open-source and we will continue to improve them based on your feedback. Your feature requests are welcome!