Query Sitecore xDB MongoDatabases Part 1

Mongo databases are integral part of Sitecore xDB and they are the main data stores for the Sitecore Experience Platform. Experience Analytics, Experience Profile and Experience Optimization all in a way or other depends on Mongo databases. It always good to have some hands-on queries related to mongo in case troubleshooting or understanding of sitecore analytics data is required. In this blog post I am sharing some ground up work that needs to be done before firing some queries to mongo. It is definitely on my plan to write another part of this blog post to list down basic mongo queries.Sitecore sends a persistent session cookie “SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE” to identify a potential contact or repeated visits from a single user. The value of the cookie is a GUID and can be found into “Contacts” collection of sitecore_analytics mongo database. RoboMongo can be used to connect and fire up a query to filter data. Mongo stores GUID as a value and not string so executing below query in RoboMongo will not fetch any results.db.Contacts.find({_id:'{3b4b5488-d3a0-40b1-9099-9b896c55abf0}'})ordb.getCollection('Contacts').find({_id:'{3b4b5488-d3a0-40b1-9099-9b896c55abf0}'})Mongo has provided javascript helper functions for parsing and displaying UUIDs. CSUUID is one of them which is used to query mongo db for finding a contact. So, your query would look likedb.Contacts.find({_id:CSUUID(‘{3b4b5488-d3a0-40b1-9099-9b896c55abf0}’)})Below are the steps that needs to be followed for making CSUUID available,

1. Download uuidhelpers.js.
2. If .mongorc.js does not exists on your user profile create one.
3. Update .mongorc.js file by adding load("C:\\Users\\bpatel\\uuidhelpers.js"); to it. In my case I have placed .mongorc.js and uuidhelpers.js at the same path.
4. Load .mongorc.js in Robomongo.
5. Make sure to change Legacy UUID Encoding to Use .Net Encoding.Now firing the query db.Contacts.find({_id:CSUUID(‘{3b4b5488-d3a0-40b1-9099-9b896c55abf0}’)}) will fetch a result. RoboMongo dispalys the type of encoding that is being used,
   
   After the Encoding is switched it displays NUUID aka .NET UUID.
   
   Point to notice is the GUID too changes as for Legacy encoding it was 88544b3b-a0d3-b140-9099-9b896c55abf0 and for .NET Encoding it is 3b4b5488-d3a0-40b1-9099-9b896c55abf0

Stay tuned for next part of this blog post for some basics of mongo queries.Second post in the series is now available,

• Query Sitecore xDB MongoDatabases Part 2