How to inspect a MongoDB backup database?

Question

I backup the server's MongoDB database with mongodump . Now I want to inspect the backup of the database.

The backup is in BSON and JSON formats:

$ ls <db-name>
contacts.bson  contacts.metadata.json ...

I want to run simple commands on the database, such as db.contacts.find({}) and possibly also complex ones, such as aggregation and projection.

I could use mongo-restore which would overwrite the production database. I could transfer it to another machine and restore it too. Both strike me as non-agile.

Does MongoDB allow quick inspection of a database backup?

Answer 1

If you want to query data in a database dump, load it into a running server and then query that server.

You can manually read a dump file, for example see here for the Ruby BSON API. This isn't something the vast majority of applications do though.