I am developing an API using Codeigniter and MongoDB. In this system I am saving the full name and _ID of users that the selected user is following.
What is best to do regarding the _Id? Store it as an object or as a string? If I store it as an object I need to convert it to string when echoing out followers otherwise the output looks strange.
My question is really. Is it ok to store the _Id as a string rather than an object? What is the downside of storing as string?
Thankful for all input!
Performance for requests (and updates) are really better with objectid. More over, objectid are quite small in space.
From the official doc :
BSON includes a binary data datatype for storing byte arrays. Using this will make the id values, and their respective keys in the _id index, twice as small.
here are 2 links that can help you : - http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Optimizing+Object+IDs - http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Object+IDs
When you use ObjectId, it generates _id as a unique value in all your computers. So if you use Sharding, you will not worry about you _id conflicts. See how ObjectId generates in specification
But if you use string, you should generate it carefully.
