I have a query that searches on two fields: one of those fields is indexed, and one is not.
Will Mongo do the right thing by first searching on the indexed field, and only then searching the other non-indexed search parameter?
It depends.
If you have normal find, then IXSCAN will be used on indexed field. You can check this by using explain()
If you have aggregate queries and your first stage matches on non indexed field and second stage uses indexed field, then index will not be used. Here also you can use explain() to check.
The answer is maybe.
What MongoDB will do is the first time it sees a particular query shape, it will run a short test.
It determines all of the potential index plans that might be used to service the query, including collection scan.
It then runs each of these in parallel, with a limit of 101 documents, 101 units of work, or 100 milliseconds.
The score for each plan is the number of documents found during the test period, divided by the number of units of work required.
After the test, any plan that completed gets bonus points, and additional bonus points if it completed without needing an in-memory sort.
This plan is then cached to be reuse the next time it sees a query with the same shape.
You can run explain with the "allPlansExecution" options to see all of the candidate plans that were considered, and how each compares.
In most cases, it will choose the index as expected, but there are some situations where it doesn't, and explain can be very useful to determine why.
Related
A non-distributed database has many posts, posts have zero or more user-defined tags, most posts have the most_posts_have_this tag, few posts have the few_posts_have_this tag.
When querying {'tags': {'$all': ['most_posts_have_this', 'few_posts_have_this']}} the query is slow, it seems to be iterating through posts with the most_posts_have_this tag.
Is there some way to hint to MongoDB that it should be iterating through posts with the few_posts_have_this tag instead?
Is there some way to hint to MongoDB that it should be iterating through posts with the few_posts_have_this tag instead?
Short answer is no, this is due to how Mongo builds an index on an array:
To index a field that holds an array value, MongoDB creates an index key for each element in the array
So when you when you query the tags field imagine mongo queries each tag separately then it does an intersection.
If you run "explain" you will be able to see that after the index scan phase Mongo executes a fetch document phase, this phase in theory should be redundant for an pure index scan which shows this is not the case. So basically Mongo fetches ALL documents that have either of the tags, only then it performs the "$all" logic in the filtering phase.
So what can you do?
if you have prior knowledge on which tag is sparser you could first query that and only then filter based on the larger tag, I'm assuming this is not really the case but worth considering if possible. If your tags are somewhat static maybe you can precalculate this even.
Otherwise you will have to reconsider a restructuring that will allow better index usage for this usecase, I will say for most access patterns your structure is better.
The new structure can be an object like so:
tags2: {
tagname1: 1,
tagname2: 2,
...
}
Now if you built an index on tags2 each key of the object will be indexed separately, this will make mongo skip the "fetch" phase as the index contains all the information needed to execute the following query:
{"tags2.most_posts_have_this" :{$exists: true}, "tags2.few_posts_have_this": {$exists: true}}
I understand both solutions are underwhelming to say the least, but sadly Mongo does not excel in this specific use case.. I can think of more "hacky" approaches but I would say these 2 are the more reasonable ones to actually consider implementing depending on performance requirments.
Is there some way to hint to MongoDB that it should be iterating through posts with the few_posts_have_this tag instead?
Not really. When Mongo runs an $all it is going to get all records with both tags first. You could try using two $in queries in an aggregation instead, selecting the less frequent tag first. I'm not sure if this would actually be faster (depends on how Mongo optimizes things) but could be worth a try.
The best you can do:
Make sure you have an an index on the tags field. I see in the comments you have done this.
Mongo may be using the wrong index for this query. You can see which it is using with cursor.explain(). You can force it to use your tags index with hint(). First use db.collection.getIndexes() to make sure your tags index shows up as expected in the list of indexes.
Using projections to return only the fields you need might speed things up. For example, depending on your use case, you might return just post IDs and then query full text for a smaller subset of the returned posts. This could speed things up because Mongo doesn't have to manage as much intermediate data.
You could also consider periodically sorting the tags array field by frequency. If the least frequent tags are first, Mongo may be able to skip further scanning for that document. It will still fetch all the matching documents, but if your tag lists are very large it could save time by skipping the later tags. See The ESR (Equality, Sort, Range) Rule for more details on optimizing your indexed fields.
If all that's still not fast enough and the performance of these queries is critical, you'll need to do something more drastic:
Upgrade your machine (ensure it has enough RAM to store your whole dataset, or at least your indexes, in memory)
Try sharding
Revisit your data model. The fastest possible result will be if you can turn this query into a covered query. This may or may not be possible on an array field.
See Mongo's optimizing query performance for more detail, but again, it is unlikely to help with this use case.
I'm looking for an advice about which indexing strategy to use in MongoDb 3.4.
Let's suppose we have a people collection of documents with the following shape:
{
_id: 10,
name: "Bob",
age: 32,
profession: "Hacker"
}
Let's imagine that a web api to query the collection is exposed and that the only possibile filters are by name or by age.
A sample call to the api will be something like: http://myAwesomeWebSite/people?name="Bob"&age=25
Such a call will be translated in the following query: db.people.find({name: "Bob", age: 25}).
To better clarify our scenario, consider that:
the field name was already in our documents and we already have an index on that field
we are going to add the new field age due to some new features of our application
the database is only accessible via the web api mentioned above and the most important requirement is to expose a super fast web api
all the calls to the web api will apply a filter on both the fields name and age (put another way, all the calls to the web api will have the same pattern, which is the one showed above)
That said, we have to decide which of the following indexes offer the best performance:
One compound index: {name: 1, age: 1}
Two single-field indexes: {name: 1} and {age: 1}
According to some simple tests, it seems that the single compound index is much more performant than the two single-field indexes.
By executing a single query via the mongo shell, the explain() method suggests that using a single compound index you can query the database nearly ten times faster than using two single fields indexes.
This difference seems to be less drammatic in a more realistic scenario, where instead of executing a single query via the mongo shell, multiple calls are made to two different urls of a nodejs web application. Both urls execute a query to the database and return the fetched data as a json array, one using a collection with the single compound index and the other using a collection with two single-field indexes (both collections having exactly the same documents).
In this test the single compound index still seems to be the best choice in terms of performance, but this time the difference is less marked.
According to test results, we are considering to use the single compound index approach.
Does anyone has experience about this topic ? Are we missing any important consideration (maybe some disadvantage of big compound indexes) ?
Given a plain standard query (with no limit() or sort() or anything fancy applied) that has a filter condition on two fields (as in name and age in your example), in order to find the resulting documents, MongoDB will either:
do a full collection scan (read every document in the entire collection, parse the BSON, find the values in question, test them against the input and return/discard each document): This is super I/O intense and hence slow.
use one index that holds one of the fields (use index tree to locate relevant subset of documents followed by a scan of them): Depending on your data distribution/index selectivity this can be very fast or barely provide any benefit (imagine an index on age in a dataset of millions of people between 30 and 40 years --> every lookup would still yield an endless number of documents).
use two indexes that together contain both fields in question (load both indexes, perform key lookups, then calculate the intersection of the results): Again, depending on your data distribution, this may or may not give you great(er) performance. It should, however, in most cases be faster than #2. I would, however, be surprised if it was really 10x slower then #4 (as you mentioned).
use a compound index (two subsequent key lookups immediately lead to the required documents): This will be the fastest option of all given that it requires the least and cheapest operations to get to the right documents. In order to ensure the greatest level of reuse (not performance which won't be affected by this) you should in general start with the most selective field first, so in your case probably name and not age given that a lot of people will have the same age (so low selectivity) compared to name (higher selectivity). But that choice also depends on your concrete scenario and the queries you intend to run against your database. There is a pretty good article on the web about how to best define a compound index taking various aspects of your specific situation into account: https://emptysqua.re/blog/optimizing-mongodb-compound-indexes
Other aspects to consider are: Index updates come at a certain price. However, if all you care about is raw read speed and you only have a few updates every now and again, then you should go for more/bigger indexes.
And last but not least (!) the well over-used bottom line advice: Profile the hell out of your system using real data and perhaps even realistic load scenarios. And also keep measuring as your data/system changes over time.
Additional reads:
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/query-optimization/index.html
https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/158240/mongodb-index-intersection-does-not-eliminate-the-need-for-creating-compound-in
Index intersection vs. compound index?
mongodb compund index vs. index intersect
How does the order of compound indexes matter in MongoDB performance-wise?
In MongoDB, I am using a large query, how I will create compound index or single index, So My response time boost up
I'm building an app that calls data from MongoDB. For purposes of this question, pretend that the user searches my app for a certain query, and MongoDB has 4,000 results to spit out that match the query.
After reading around a bit, I see that it's possible to paginate using the .skip() method, but MongoDB themselves suggest against using this as it requires the curser to iterate through all the records up until the one you're skipping to, which gets more and more expensive the higher in the list you go.
I've seen a few tutorials that rely on the _id property of the results to be sequential, but this doesn't apply here - my database has tens of thousands of records, and each has a unique id, and the 4000 results that apply to the user's query are definitely not going to be sequential.
Can anyone think of a way to do this, or is skip() the only option here?
Other considerations:
The pagination will work based on the position on the page. For instance, the first query should spit out 20 records to my app. When the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, I could potentially get the _id of the 20th element on the page and pass that to my query, find it in the list of 4,000 results, find the subsequent result and start the next set of 20 from there. Is that sort of thing possible, and would it be less CPU intensive than skip()?
Your trick in "other considerations" works only if you add a sort on _id, otherwise you can't guarantee order for follow up queries. If you want to sort on a different field, you need to index that field. I would also suggest you query for 21 elements so that you don't have to go back and find the next one after the 20th element (of course, you can still show only the first 20 elements).
MongoDB ranged pagination has a good example as well.
Suppose I have a Mongo collection with fields a and b. I've populated this collection with {a:'a', b : index } where index increases iteratively from 0 to 1000.
I know this is very, very wrong, but can't explain (no pun intended) why:
collection.find({i:{$gt:500}}).explain() confirms that the index was not used (I can see that it scanned all 1,000 documents in the collection).
Somehow forcing Mongo to use the index seems to work though:
collection.find({i:{$gt:500}}).hint({a:1,i:1}).explain()
Edit
The Mongo documentation is very clear that it will only use compound indexes if one of your query terms is the matches the first term of the compound index. In this case, using hint, it appears that Mongo used the compound index {a:1,i:1} even though the query terms do NOT include a. Is this true?
The interesting part about the way MongoDB performs queries is that it actually may run multiple queries in parallel to determine what is the best plan. It may have chosen to not use the index due to other experimenting you've done from the shell, or even when you added the data and whether it was in memory, etc/ (or a few other factors). Looking at the performance numbers, it's not reporting that using the index was actually any faster than not (although you shouldn't take much stock in those numbers generally). In this case, the data set is really small.
But, more importantly, according to the MongoDB docs, the output from the hinted run also suggests that the query wasn't covered entirely by the index (indexOnly=false).
That's because your index is a:1, i:1, yet the query is for i. Compound indexes only support searches based on any prefix of the indexed fields (meaning they must be in the order they were specified).
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/read-operations/#query-optimization
FYI: Use the verbose option to see a report of all plans that were considered for the find().
In Mongo, suppose I have a collection mycollection that has fields a, b, and huge. I very frequently want to perform queries, mapreduce, updates, etc. on a, and b and very occassionally want to return huge in query results as well.
I know that db.mycollection.find() will scan the entire collection and result in Mongo attempting to add the whole collection to the working set, which may exceed the amount of RAM I have available.
If I instead call db.mycollection.find({}, { a : 1, b : 1 }), will this still result in the whole collection being added to the working set or only the terms of my projection?
MongoDB can use something called covered queries: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/indexes/#create-indexes-that-support-covered-queries these allow you to load all the values from the index rather than the disk, or memory, if those documents are in memory at the time.
Be warned that you cannot use covered queries on a full table scan, the condition, projection and sort must all be within the index; i.e.:
db.col.ensureIndex({a:1,b:1});
db.col.find({a:1}, {_id:0, a:1, b:1})(.sort({b:1}));
Would work (the sort is in brackets because it is not totally needed). You can add _id to your index if you intend to return that too.
Map Reduce does not support covered queries, there is no way to project only a certain amount of fields into the MR, as far as I know; maybe there is some hack I do not know of. Map Reduce only supports a $match like operator in terms of input query with a separate parameter for the sort of the incoming query ( http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/map-reduce/ ).
Note that for updates I believe only atomic operations: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/isolate-sequence-of-operations/ (excluding findAndModify) do not load the document into your working set, however, believe is the keyword there.
Considering you need to do both MR and normal find and update on these records I would strongly recommend you look into checking why you are paging in so much data and whether you really do need to do it that often. It seems like you are trying to do too much processing in a short and frequent amount of time.
On the other hand, if this is a script which runs every night or something then I would not worry too much about its excessive working set (i.e. score board recalc script).