The insert() Method in MongoDB

The insert() Method

To insert data into MongoDB collection, you need to use MongoDB's insert() orsave()method.

Syntax

Basic syntax of insert() command is as follows:

>db.COLLECTION_NAME.insert(document)

Example

>db.mycol.insert({
   _id: ObjectId(7df78ad8902c),
   title: 'MongoDB Overview', 
   description: 'MongoDB is no sql database',
   by: 'tutorials point',
   url: 'http://www.tutorialspoint.com',
   tags: ['mongodb', 'database', 'NoSQL'],
   likes: 100
})

Here mycol is our collection name, as created in previous tutorial. If the collection doesn't exist in the database, then MongoDB will create this collection and then insert document into it.

In the inserted document if we don't specify the _id parameter, then MongoDB assigns an unique ObjectId for this document.

_id is 12 bytes hexadecimal number unique for every document in a collection. 12 bytes are divided as follows:

_id: ObjectId(4 bytes timestamp, 3 bytes machine id, 2 bytes process id, 3 bytes incrementer)

To insert multiple documents in single query, you can pass an array of documents in insert() command.

Example

>db.post.insert([
{
   title: 'MongoDB Overview', 
   description: 'MongoDB is no sql database',
   by: 'tutorials point',
   url: 'http://www.tutorialspoint.com',
   tags: ['mongodb', 'database', 'NoSQL'],
   likes: 100
},
{
   title: 'NoSQL Database', 
   description: 'NoSQL database doesn't have tables',
   by: 'tutorials point',
   url: 'http://www.tutorialspoint.com',
   tags: ['mongodb', 'database', 'NoSQL'],
   likes: 20, 
   comments: [ 
      {
         user:'user1',
         message: 'My first comment',
         dateCreated: new Date(2013,11,10,2,35),
         like: 0 
      }
   ]
}
])

To insert the document you can use db.post.save(document) also. If you don't specify _idin the document then save() method will work same as insert() method. If you specify _id then it will replace whole data of document containing _id as specified in save() method.

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