In the last post I went through some stuff/problems with map/reduce. As a summary and to introduce a couple of other specific issues:

1. It's hard to understand.
2. It's not obvious how to do mapreduce in ruby.
3. It sucks writing javascript in your ruby app.
4. Blogs on the internet seem to recommend that you recalculate the map/reduce every time you need to access the data.

So I've written a gem called Reduceable for mongomapper (although hopefully mongoid support is coming soon) which should address all of the above problems.

You can find the full source for this gem at: http://github.com/lengarvey/reduceable

Here is a taste of how it works:

require 'mongo_mapper'
require 'reduceable'

MongoMapper.database = 'my_database_name'

class BlogPost
  include MongoMapper::Document
  include Reduceable

  key :article_body, String
  key :categories, Array
  key :time_posted, Time
  key :article_length, Integer
end

# Insert some data

BlogPost.count_by(:categories).to_a.each do |x|
  puts "You have posted #{x['value']} posts from catefory #{x['_id']}"
end
BlogPost.sum_of(:article_length, :categories).to_a.each do |x|
  puts "You have written #{x['value']} characters in category #{x['_id']}"
end

This is a fairly contrived example, but it gives you a good idea of the direction this should be heading in. I'm trying to abstract away the complexity of writing common map/reduce functions. This addresses points 1, 2 and 3 above. The 4th point is handled by an ActiveRecord callback 'after_save' which is inserted into the BlogPost model which will invalidate the cached records and cause the count_by and sum_of functions to force a recalculation of the map/reduce results.

It's definitely not perfect, but I'm hopeful I can make this into something useful.