1. Exploring Public APIs with
MongoDB and Analytica
Nosh Petigara
nosh@analytica.com
@noshp

2. Today
• MongoDB and public APIs
• What is Analytica?
• Demo
– Analytica shell (twitter data)
– Analytica for Excel (StackOverflow data)

3. MongoDB and public APIs
• Most APIs talk JSON
– MongoDB’s native JSON import
• APIs vary wildly (internally and between one
another)
– MongoDB is schema-free
• Data import is only half the battle
– MongoDB’s query language and aggregation
framework

4. Some data sets to explore
• Twitter API (JSON)
– https://dev.twitter.com/
• Crunchbase API (JSON)
– http://developer.crunchbase.com/
• Stackoverflow (JSON and CSV)
– http://data.stackexchange.com/
• NYTimes (JSON, XML)
– http://developer.nytimes.com/docs

5. Importing data sets
• Streaming JSON directly into MongoDB
– curl
https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.jso
n –uUSERNAME:PASSword| ./mongoimport –d
twitter –c tweets
• Importing JSON files
– ./mongoimport –d mydb –c mycoll file.json
• CSV
– ./mongoimport –d db –c coll --type csv --
headerline myfile.csv

6. Analytica
• Analytics & reporting platform for MongoDB
– Natively understands JSON/document hierarchy
– Tailored for analytics (not querying)
– Works directly on MongoDB
• Discovery, analysis, visualization cycle
• In private beta [http://analytica.com]

7. What can you do with Analytica?
• Inspect and extract data
• Augment your data model
• Calculate & aggregate
• Filter and transform data
• Join collections

8. Demos
• Today
– Twitter stats [using the Analytica Shell]
– Stackoverflow community analysis [using
Analytica for Excel]
• Not shown
– REST API
– Analytica web (Coming soon)

9. Demo 1: Twitter data

10. Some other examples
Tweets vs. retweets count(select(twitter.tweets.where(retweet_count <> 0)))
vs. replies
Follower counts max(twitter.tweets.user.followers_count)
Popular hashtags set twitter.byhashtag = group(tweets.by(entities.hashtags.text))
set twitter.byhashtag.tweetcount = count(tweets)
set twitter.populartags = orderdesc(byhashtag.by(tweetcount))
get twitter.populartags.text

11. Demo 2: StackOverflow User Profiles

12. Next steps
• Private beta
– http://analytica.com
• Get in touch
– nosh@analytica.com or info@analytica.com
• @analytica_inc on twitter