ChartDB for MongoDB? Imagine Visualizing Your Document Structure - We Want Your Thoughts!

Working with Data Developer Tools
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Hello MongoDB Community!

I’m one of the creators of ChartDB, an open-source tool designed to visualize and interact with database schemas. Right now, it’s optimized for relational databases (RDBMS), helping users easily map out table relationships and schemas. You can check out the project on GitHub.

We’re interested in exploring MongoDB support, but we recognize MongoDB’s document-oriented, hierarchical structure is quite different from the flat schemas we’re used to in RDBMS. I’d love your input to understand if and how a tool like ChartDB could be valuable for MongoDB users.

Specifically:

  • Would a schema visualization tool for MongoDB be useful to you?
  • If so, how would you imagine it working given MongoDB’s hierarchical data structure? What key features or visualization elements do you think would add value?

If there are any pain points in visualizing or managing data structures in MongoDB, it would be incredibly helpful to know! I’d also appreciate any ideas you have for navigating these structural differences between MongoDB and RDBMS.

Thanks in advance for your feedback. Your insights will help shape our approach as we consider MongoDB support for ChartDB.

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Hi @Jonathan_Fishner - I’m the product manager for data modeling with MongoDB and would be happy to share some insights with you. If you’d like to chat feel free to DM me and we can schedule something.

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Hi @Julia_Oppenheim, Thank you so much for reaching out! I’d love to connect and hear your insights on data modeling with MongoDB. I appreciate you taking the time to offer your perspective.

I’ll send you a DM on LinkedIn to coordinate, so we can arrange a time that works for both of us. Looking forward to the conversation!

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This looks like a super useful direction for visualizing data structures! Especially for folks who are working with large, complex nested documents in MongoDB — having a visual overview can really cut down the cognitive load. I’ve often found that a big challenge when onboarding new team members or reviewing older collections is just helping people see what’s going on.

A few thoughts that might help:

  • It’d be cool if the tool could let users switch between document-level structure and collection-wide insights (like field presence across documents, index usage, etc.).
  • Also, if you can add support for schema versioning or history comparisons, that would be gold for teams making frequent updates.

On a related note, if anyone’s looking to do more comprehensive visual modeling or collaborative planning with their MongoDB data or workflows, One example site is Creately - A flowchart software - a general visual collaboration platform, but it has some solid templates for database modeling, flow diagrams, and team planning — plus the infinite canvas makes it easy to link high-level planning with technical details.

Would love to see where ChartDB goes — great initiative!

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Love this! I actually created something similar for MongoDB… albeit not nearly as feature-rich. you can check it out here: https://mongodb-erd.com, or by installing via npm.

npm install mongodb-erd-cli

and setting your MONGODB_URI environment variable:

export MONGODB_URI=mongodb+srv://mike:<pass>%21@yourcluster.zbcul.mongodb.net/yourdb

then running:

npx mongodb-erd --format png

Select your database, then your collections and I’ll create a diagram of the collections… the challenge as I’m sure you’re seeing is establishing relationships as there is no external definition of the relationships for MongoDB like there is with an RDBMS.

I’d love to collab / contribute… I’ll have a look at the repo.