MongoDB's reduce-phase is not working as expected

Question

I worked with a java-tutorial for mapReduce-Programming in MongoDB and ended up with the following Code:

package mapReduceExample;

import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;
import com.mongodb.DB;
import com.mongodb.DBCollection;
import com.mongodb.DBObject;
import com.mongodb.MapReduceCommand;
import com.mongodb.MapReduceOutput;
import com.mongodb.Mongo;

public class MapReduceExampleMain {

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Mongo mongo;

        try {
            mongo = new Mongo("localhost", 27017);
            DB db = mongo.getDB("library");

            DBCollection books = db.getCollection("books");

            BasicDBObject book = new BasicDBObject();
            book.put("name", "Understanding JAVA");
            book.put("pages", 100);
            books.insert(book);

            book = new BasicDBObject();
            book.put("name", "Understanding JSON");
            book.put("pages", 200);
            books.insert(book);

            book = new BasicDBObject();
            book.put("name", "Understanding XML");
            book.put("pages", 300);
            books.insert(book);

            book = new BasicDBObject();
            book.put("name", "Understanding Web Services");
            book.put("pages", 400);
            books.insert(book);

            book = new BasicDBObject();
            book.put("name", "Understanding Axis2");
            book.put("pages", 150);
            books.insert(book);

            String map = "function()"
                    + "{ "
                        + "var category; "
                        + "if ( this.pages > 100 ) category = 'Big Books'; "
                        + "else category = 'Small Books'; "
                        + "emit(category, {name: this.name});"
                    + "}";

            String reduce = "function(key, values)"
                    + "{"
                        + "return {books: values.length};"
                    + "} ";

            MapReduceCommand cmd = new MapReduceCommand(books, map, reduce,
                    null, MapReduceCommand.OutputType.INLINE, null);

            MapReduceOutput out = books.mapReduce(cmd);

            for (DBObject o : out.results()) {
                System.out.println(o.toString());
            }

            //aufräumen
            db.dropDatabase();

        } catch (Exception e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }



    }
}

This is a pretty simple reduce-Phase, but it does not what I want :(

The output is:

{ "_id" : "Big Books" , "value" : { "books" : 4.0}}
{ "_id" : "Small Books" , "value" : { "name" : "Understanding JAVA"}}

I would expect this:

{ "_id" : "Big Books" , "value" : { "books" : 4.0}}
{ "_id" : "Small Books" , "value" : { "books" : 1.0}}

Why does the reduce-Phase not give back the values.length in the case of a small book?

Greetings, Andre

Answer 1

Becuase if there is only one results the reduce is never run. Change it to be a finalise function or something.

Answer 2

A Basic Understanding of how mapReduce Works

---

Let us introduce the concepts of mapReduce

• mapper - This is the stage that emit's the data to be fed into the reduce stage. It requires a key and a value be to sent. You can emit several times if you want in a mapper, but the requirements stay the same.

• reducer - A reducer is called when there is more than one value of a given key to process the list of values that have been emitted for that key.

---

That said, since the mapper only emitted one key value your reducer was not called.

You can clean this up in finalise , but the behavior of the emit from the mapper going straight through is by standard design.