Software recommendation: MongoDB UI – Robomongo

I’ve been looking a while now for a good way to manage data in MongoDB database servers. The command line tool is OK, but its not really easy to work with, even doing simple stuff like listing the content of a collection.

For a while I’ve been using Genghis, which has an interesting approach to a local graphical interface: it starts a local web server and invokes a web browser to access that server. The UI is pretty nice and very responsive, but it is kind of flaky and lately has stopped working for me entirely. Also the data density you can get from a nice looking web UI is still much lower then you can get in a well designed desktop UI – and when looking at a lot of data records in a database, data density is very important.

Enter Robomongo:

Robomongo 0.8.5_005

With simple UI, but with a lot of power, you can probably see how useful it is: multiple servers; all databases and collections in an easy to use tree; queries in tabs; filter using any valid MongoDB experssion; tree-like document display with easy drill down and a lot of information. There’s even a “table view” for query results if you really want to feel like you’re using an RDBMS.

Written in Qt and licensed as GPLv3, this open source tool runs on all three major platforms and looks and feels great doing so. In summary – I highly recommend.

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