Studio 3T/Navicat over Mongo Compass

July 28, 2018 · by · in MongoDB

Though Mongo Compass is MongoDB’s Inhouse product, there are lot of missing functionalities and issues. I would say it’s a just a basic GUI with very minimal functionalities. In fact, if you use mongo shell you’ll feel more comfortable than Mongo Compass.

While rest of 3rd party GUIs (like Robo 3T, Studio 3T, Navicat ..etc ) are way ahead in the functionalities, Compass is still (latest version 1.14) suffering with usability issues like restoring session fails with reboot, no SQL-JSON convertor, no plain text query bar, no import/export, lot of query operators can not be executed directly at GUI like distinct ( which needs to be executed thru an aggregate function ) .. and so on.

Any perfect GUI needs to have below advanced functionalities along with basic features in my opinion.

    • Build your MongoDB queries via drag-and–drop
    • Autocomplete queries down to field names
    • Query MongoDB with SQL
    • Translate MongoDB and SQL queries to five languages
    • Break down aggregation queries into stages
    • Edit data in-place
    • Compare collections and view differences side-by-side
  • Discover data schema and find outliers

Few issues/missing functionalities of Compass in detail below.

  1. Query bar issue :  There seem to be issue with MongoDB Compass application – when we type filter it freezes and prints typed characters in a wrong order. E.g. if we quickly type “{city: “ it results in something like “
    {cityity: }” or “{ty: cit” even if type within {} braces.

Additionally, Query editor behaves weird when editing query – cursor jumps unpredictably, curly braces sometimes added automatically where it should not be, etc.

Not sure whether it’s fixed in 1.14

  1. Hotkeys : Ideally We you’re looking for keyboard shortcuts like other IDEs/GUIs have, for example executing query ( E.g., SQLyog has “F9“ to execute the query ) instead of doing it with mouse ‘FIND’ button from GUI.

Even the online documentation only mentions mouse click “Click Find to run the query and view the updated results.”

    1. Saved session/connections : When you reboot system/pc and relaunch the MC application, you’ll lose all the previously saved sessions/connections.

    1. Distinct queries : You don’t see any option to execute such queries.

  1. Plain Query Bar : There should be additionally a plain query bar without any filter/project/sort options as sometimes you’ll need to execute saved report queries for sampling which you can not run in the current query bar as is due to the filters.

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