Here we go! Welcome to your first lesson.
In this lesson you will learn how to install RavenDB and start using it.
There are several ways to run RavenDB.
The console mode is very useful for development, because you can see the incoming requests to RavenDB, and you can interact with the server directly. For production usage, you can install RavenDB as a Windows Service or in IIS. For running in the cloud, you can use the RavenDB as a Service option provided by RavenHQ.
In this lesson we will learn how to start RavenDB in the console.
Go to the RavenDB download page, and download the latest version. It is just a zip file - get it and extract it.
Go ahead and do it, I'll wait.
Done?! Now, open the extracted folder, locate the Start.cmd file and double
click it. This will start RavenDB in console (debug) mode as well as open your
browser to point to RavenDB Management Studio.
Congratulations! Now you have RavenDB up and running on your computer.
By default, RavenDB will try to use http://localhost:8080 as its endpoint.
But, if you have a service already taking this port, RavenDB will try port 8081,
and so on.
First time opening the Studio, it will ask you to create a database. Let's do it!
To start, enter Northwind as database name and press the Create Button.
Congratulations! You just created your first RavenDB database... but, it is empty.
For learning purposes let's load some sample data into our database.
Open the Northwind database and go to the Tasks tab and then
to Create Sample Data dialog. Go ahead and press the Create Sample Data button.
After a little processing, we have data that we can play with.
The Northwind database is the sample database that came with SQL Server, it has been used for decades as the sample database in the Microsoft community. We chose this database as our sample data because it is likely already familiar to you in its relational format.
Go to the Documents tab and check out your data.
That's great. We just launched RavenDB in console mode, created our first database and loaded some sample data. But, wait! It looks remarkably similar to what you see in a relational database. Right? The data is shown in a grid format with the tables on the left.
If you click on any "record" you will start to see the NoSQL magic!
Yes! All RavenDB data is stored as JSON.
Using the Go to document feature (the text box in the Studio toolbar), go to the
document orders/101.
{
"Company": "companies/86",
"Employee": "employees/4",
"OrderedAt": "1996-11-07T00:00:00.0000000",
"RequireAt": "1996-12-05T00:00:00.0000000",
"ShippedAt": "1996-11-15T00:00:00.0000000",
"ShipTo": {
"Line1": "Adenauerallee 900",
"Line2": null,
"City": "Stuttgart",
"Region": null,
"PostalCode": "70563",
"Country": "Germany"
},
"ShipVia": "shippers/2",
"Freight": 0.78,
"Lines": [
{
"Product": "products/1",
"ProductName": "Chai",
"PricePerUnit": 14.4,
"Quantity": 15,
"Discount": 0.15
},
{
"Product": "products/23",
"ProductName": "Tunnbröd",
"PricePerUnit": 7.2,
"Quantity": 25,
"Discount": 0
}
]
}It is very different from what we're used to in relational databases.
A document is a self-describing, hierarchical tree data structure which can consist of maps, collections, and scalar values.
Being practical, RavenDB database stores documents, which are plain JSON formatted
data. So, we can aggregate related information into a common object, as in the case
of the ShipTo property which has all the shipping information.
In a Document Database, documents are organized in collections.
Documents in RavenDB are all stored in the same storage space. They are not physically grouped in any way. But, you probably expect some level of organization. For example, documents holding customers data are very different from documents holding products information, and you want to talk about groups of them. RavenDB allows for a document to be stamped with a string value that will be evidence of its type (like "Customers" and "Products").
Note that documents that are in the same collection can have a completely different structure, which is fine because RavenDB is schema-less.
Step 1: Open the RavenDB Management Studio at http://localhost:8080
Step 2: Open the Northwind Database
Step 3: In the Documents tab, explore all the collections.
Awesome! You have just completed your first lesson.
Let's move onto Lesson 2 and start writing some code.