MongoDB/NoSQL: Keeping Document Change History

Question

A fairly common requirement in database applications is to track changes to one or more specific entities in a database. I\'ve heard this called row versioning, a log table

Answer 1

One can have a current NoSQL database and a historical NoSQL database. There will be a an nightly ETL ran everyday. This ETL will record every value with a timestamp, so instead of values it will always be tuples (versioned fields). It will only record a new value if there was a change made on the current value, saving space in the process. For example, this historical NoSQL database json file can look like so:

{
  _id: "4c6b9456f61f000000007ba6"
  title: [
    { date: 20160101, value: "Hello world" },
    { date: 20160202, value: "Foo" }
  ],
  body: [
    { date: 20160101, value: "Is this thing on?" },
    { date: 20160102, value: "What should I write?" },
    { date: 20160202, value: "This is the new body" }
  ],
  tags: [
    { date: 20160101, value: [ "test", "trivial" ] },
    { date: 20160102, value: [ "foo", "test" ] }
  ],
  comments: [
    {
      author: "joe", // Unversioned field
      body: [
        { date: 20160301, value: "Something cool" }
      ]
    },
    {
      author: "xxx",
      body: [
        { date: 20160101, value: "Spam" },
        { date: 20160102, deleted: true }
      ]
    },
    {
      author: "jim",
      body: [
        { date: 20160101, value: "Not bad" },
        { date: 20160102, value: "Not bad at all" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}