Collection naming problems with MongoDB - Do not include hyphens

Problem: Wrongly named collections in MongoDB will cause exceptions

Why the problem occurs:

I found most of my tips from this article.

http://blog.shlomoid.com/2011/08/how-to-fix-erroneously-named-mongodb.html

Collection names should begin with letters or an underscore and may include numbers; $ is reserved. Collections can be organized in namespaces; these are named groups of collections defined using a dot notation.

You can create collections with names that include hyphens. As explained in the article above, the db.runCommand for creating a collection can look like:

db.runCommand({"create":"test-col"});

However, since the javascript console will interpret collection names with hyphens in them as subtracting letters, you will get errors.

Solution:
https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/PHP-282

You need to be in to your admin db (and you might need to login first, might not for local)

> use db1
> db.auth(user, pass)
> use admin
> db.runCommand ({renameCollection: "db1.test-col", to: "db1.testCol"})

If that does not work, you might need to repair your database using mongod.
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair

For my Clojure web app, I tried to keep to a naming convention for my data (using hyphens for spaces) and my functions (using underscore for spaces) but I got a gotcha with Javascript (I think this will happen when using ClojureScript too).