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Is it a good idea to store copies of documents from a mongodb collection in a dictionary list, and use this data instead of querying the database?

I am currently developing a Python Discord bot that uses a Mongo database to store user data.
As this data is continually changed, the database would be subjected to a massive number of queries to both extract and update the data; so I'm trying to find ways to minimize client-server communication and reduce bot response times.
In this sense, is it a good idea to create a copy of a Mongo collection as a dictionary list as soon as the script is run, and manipulate the data offline instead of continually querying the database?
In particular, every time a data would be searched with the collection.find() method, it is instead extracted from the list. On the other hand, every time a data needs to be updated with collection.update(), both the list and the database are updated.
I'll give an example to better explain what I'm trying to do. Let's say that my collection contains documents with the following structure:
{"user_id": id_of_the_user, "experience": current_amount_of_experience}
and the experience value must be continually increased.
Here's how I'm implementing it at the moment:
online_collection = db["collection_name"] # mongodb cursor
offline_collection = list(online_collection.find()) # a copy of the collection
def updateExperience(user_id):
online_collection.update_one({"user_id":user_id}, {"$inc":{"experience":1}})
mydocument = next((document for document in offline_documents if document["user_id"] == user_id))
mydocument["experience"] += 1
def findExperience(user_id):
mydocument = next((document for document in offline_documents if document["user_id"] == user_id))
return mydocument["experience"]
As you can see, the database is involved only for the update function.
Is this a valid approach?
For very large collections (millions of documents) does the next () function have the same execution times or would there still be some slowdowns?
Also, while not explicitly asked in the question, I'd me more than happy to get any advice on how to improve the performance of a Discord bot, as long as it doesn't include using a VPS or sharding, since I'm already using these options.

I don't really see why not - as long as you're aware of the following :
You will need the system resources to load an entire database into memory
It is your responsibility to sync the actual db and your local store
You do need to be the only person/system updating the database
Eventually this pattern will fail i.e. db gets too large, or more than one process needs to update, so it isn't future-proof.
In essence you're talking about a caching solution - so no need to reinvent the wheel - many such products/solutions you could use.
It's probably not the traditional way of doing things, but if it works then why not

Pandas as fast data storage for Flask application

I'm impressed by the speed of running transformations, loading data and ease of use of Pandas and want to leverage all these nice properties (amongst others) to model some large-ish data sets (~100-200k rows, <20 columns). The aim is to work with the data on some computing nodes, but also to provide a view of the data sets in a browser via Flask.
I'm currently using a Postgres database to store the data, but the import (coming from csv files) of the data is slow, tedious and error prone and getting the data out of the database and processing it is not much easier. The data is never going to be changed once imported (no CRUD operations), so I thought it's ideal to store it as several pandas DataFrame (stored in hdf5 format and loaded via pytables).
The question is:
(1) Is this a good idea and what are the things to watch out for? (For instance I don't expect concurrency problems as DataFrames are (should?) be stateless and immutable (taken care of from application-side)). What else needs to be watched out for?
(2) How would I go about caching the data once it's loaded from the hdf5 file into a DataFrame, so it doesn't need to be loaded for every client request (at least the most recent/frequent dataframes). Flask (or werkzeug) has a SimpleCaching class, but, internally, it pickles the data and unpickles the cached data on access. I wonder if this is necessary in my specific case (assuming the cached object is immutable). Also, is such a simple caching method usable when the system gets deployed with Gunicorn (is it possible to have static data (the cache) and can concurrent (different process?) requests access the same cache?).
I realise these are many questions, but before I invest more time and build a proof-of-concept, I thought I get some feedback here. Any thoughts are welcome.

Answers to some aspects of what you're asking for:
It's not quite clear from your description whether you have the tables in your SQL database only, stored as HDF5 files or both. Something to look out for here is that if you use Python 2.x and create the files via pandas' HDFStore class, any strings will be pickled leading to fairly large files. You can also generate pandas DataFrame's directly from SQL queries using read_sql, for example.
If you don't need any relational operations then I would say ditch the postgre server, if it's already set up and you might need that in future keep using the SQL server. The nice thing about the server is that even if you don't expect concurrency issues, it will be handled automatically for you using (Flask-)SQLAlchemy causing you less headache. In general, if you ever expect to add more tables (files), it's less of an issue to have one central database server than maintaining multiple files lying around.
Whichever way you go, Flask-Cache will be your friend, using either a memcached or a redis backend. You can then cache/memoize the function that returns a prepared DataFrame from either SQL or HDF5 file. Importantly, it also let's you cache templates which may play a role in displaying large tables.
You could, of course, also generate a global variable, for example, where you create the Flask app and just import that wherever it's needed. I have not tried this and would thus not recommend it. It might cause all sorts of concurrency issues.

Loading data from a (MySQL) database into Django without models

This might sound like a bit of an odd question - but is it possible to load data from a (in this case MySQL) table to be used in Django without the need for a model to be present?
I realise this isn't really the Django way, but given my current scenario, I don't really know how better to solve the problem.
I'm working on a site, which for one aspect makes use of a table of data which has been bought from a third party. The columns of interest are liklely to remain stable, however the structure of the table could change with subsequent updates to the data set. The table is also massive (in terms of columns) - so I'm not keen on typing out each field in the model one-by-one. I'd also like to leave the table intact - so coming up with a model which represents the set of columns I am interested in is not really an ideal solution.
Ideally, I want to have this table in a database somewhere (possibly separate to the main site database) and access its contents directly using SQL.

You can always execute raw SQL directly against the database: see the docs.

There is one feature called inspectdb in Django. for legacy databases like MySQL , it creates models automatically by inspecting your db tables. it stored in our app files as models.py. so we don't need to type all column manually.But read the documentation carefully before creating the models because it may affect the DB data ...i hope this will be useful for you.

I guess you can use any SQL library available for Python. For example : http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
You have just then to connect to your database, perform your request and use the datas at your will. I think you can't use Django without their model system, but nothing prevents you from using another library for this in parallel.

A good blobstore / memcache solution

Setting up a data warehousing mining project on a Linux cloud server. The primary language is Python .
Would like to use this pattern for querying on data and storing data:
SQL Database - SQL database is used to query on data. However, the SQL database stores only fields that need to be searched on, it does NOT store the "blob" of data itself. Instead it stores a key that references that full "blob" of data in the a key-value Blobstore.
Blobstore - A key-value Blobstore is used to store actual "documents" or "blobs" of data.
The issue that we are having is that we would like more frequently accessed blobs of data to be automatically stored in RAM. We were planning to use Redis for this. However, we would like a solution that automatically tries to get the data out of RAM first, if it can't find it there, then it goes to the blobstore.
Is there a good library or ready-made solution for this that we can use without rolling our own? Also, any comments and criticisms about the proposed architecture would also be appreciated.
Thanks so much!

Rather than using Redis or Memcached for caching, plus a "blobstore" package to store things on disk, I would suggest to have a look at Couchbase Server which does exactly what you want (i.e. serving hot blobs from memory, but still storing them to disk).
In the company I work for, we commonly use the pattern you described (i.e. indexing in a relational database, plus blob storage) for our archiving servers (terabytes of data). It works well when the I/O done to write the blobs are kept sequential. The blobs are never rewritten, but simply appended at the end of a file (it is fine for an archiving application).
The same approach has been also used by others. For instance:
Bitcask (used in Riak): http://downloads.basho.com/papers/bitcask-intro.pdf
Eblob (used in Elliptics project): http://doc.ioremap.net/eblob:eblob

Any SQL database will work for the first part. The Blobstore could also be obtained, essentially, "off the shelf" by using cbfs. This is a new project, built on top of couchbase 2.0, but it seems to be in pretty active development.
CouchBase already tries to serve results out of RAM cache before checking disk, and is fully distributed to support large data sets.
CBFS puts a filesystem on top of that, and already there is a FUSE module written for it.
Since fileststems are effectively the lowest-common-denominator, it should be really easy for you to access it from python, and would reduce the amount of custom code you need to write.
Blog post:
http://dustin.github.com/2012/09/27/cbfs.html
Project Repository:
https://github.com/couchbaselabs/cbfs

Which one data load method is the best for perfomance?

For example, I have object user stored in database (Redis)
It has several fields:
String nick
String password
String email
List posts
List comments
Set followers
and so on...
In Python programm I have class (User) with same fields for this object. Instances of this class maps to object in database. The question is how to get data from DB for best performance:
Load values for each field on instance creating and initialize fields with it.
Load field value each time on field value requesting.
As second one but after value load replace field property by loaded value.
p.s. redis runs in localhost

The method entirely depends on the requirements.
If there is only one client reading and modifying the properties, this is a rather simple problem. When modifying data, just change the instance attributes in your current Python program and -- at the same time -- keep the DB in sync while keeping your program responsive. To that end, you should outsource blocking calls to another thread or make use of greenlets. If there is only one client, there definitely is no need to fetch a property from the DB on each value lookup.
If there are multiple clients reading the data and only one client modifying the data, you have to think about which level of synchronization you need. If you need 100 % synchronization, you will have to fetch data from the DB on each value lookup.
If there are multiple clients changing the data in the database you better look into a rock-solid industry standard solution rather than writing your own DB cache/mapper.
Your distinction between (2) and (3) does not really make sense. If you fetch data on every lookup, there is no need to 'store' data. You see, if there can be multiple clients involved these things quickly become quite complex and it's really hard to get it right.