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

For users of Python (python 3+, and up of course) , there's HistoricalCollection that's an extension of pymongo's Collection object.

Example from the docs:

from historical_collection.historical import HistoricalCollection
from pymongo import MongoClient
class Users(HistoricalCollection):
    PK_FIELDS = ['username', ]  # <<= This is the only requirement

# ...

users = Users(database=db)

users.patch_one({"username": "darth_later", "email": "darthlater@example.com"})
users.patch_one({"username": "darth_later", "email": "darthlater@example.com", "laser_sword_color": "red"})

list(users.revisions({"username": "darth_later"}))

# [{'_id': ObjectId('5d98c3385d8edadaf0bb845b'),
#   'username': 'darth_later',
#   'email': 'darthlater@example.com',
#   '_revision_metadata': None},
#  {'_id': ObjectId('5d98c3385d8edadaf0bb845b'),
#   'username': 'darth_later',
#   'email': 'darthlater@example.com',
#   '_revision_metadata': None,
#   'laser_sword_color': 'red'}]

Full disclosure, I am the package author. :)