Using an Index with Mongo's $first Group Operator - mongodb

Per Mongo's latest $group documentation, there is a special optimization for $first:
Optimization to Return the First Document of Each Group
If a pipeline sorts and groups by the same field and the $group stage only uses the $first accumulator operator, consider adding an index on the grouped field which matches the sort order. In some cases, the $group stage can use the index to quickly find the first document of each group.
It makes sense, since only the first entry in an ordered index should be needed for each bin in the $group stage. Unfortunately, in my testing, I've gotten a query that renders ~800k sorted records in about 1s, then passes them to $group, where it takes about 10s to render the 1.7k output docs for some values of key (see example below). For other values of key, it times out at 300s. There should be exactly 1704 bins in the group regardless of key, and those query bins should be covered by the first three entries in the index, as near as I can tell. Am I missing something?
db.getCollection('time_series').aggregate([
{
'$match': {
'organization_id': 1,
'key': 'waffle_count'
}
},
{
'$sort': {
'key': 1, 'asset_id': 1, 'date_time': - 1
}
},
{
'$group': {
'_id': {
'key': '$key', 'asset_id': '$asset_id'
},
'value': {
'$first': '$value'
}
}
}
]);
Here is the index:
{
"organization_id": 1,
"key": 1,
"asset_id": 1,
"date_time": -1
}

I sent a request to Atlas's MongoDB Support. The optimization that I quoted isn't available until version 4.2 (we are using 3.6). Quoting Atlas Support:
The enhancement that you're mentioning was implemented in 4.2 via SERVER-9507. For your particular example, it seems you may also need SERVER-40090 to be implemented in order for your pipeline to fully take advantage of the improvement. We will let the team know of its potential benefit for your specific situation.
As of now, the second issue is not fixed and requires a simple $group _id setup like:
'_id': 'asset_id': '$asset_id'
Whereas a key specified as an object will fail to use the index, even if it is not a composite key, like so:
'_id': { 'asset_id': '$asset_id' }

I am almost running into similar situation where we have a pipeline of match,sort and group in same order .
while match and sort stage are able to use index group is not using index even with 4.2 .
Even after https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-40090 is implemented i dont think it will allow compound key on group _id .
For e.g
'_id': { 'asset_id': '$asset_id' }
^^ will be supported
'_id': {'key': '$key', 'asset_id': '$asset_id'}
However i don't think compound _id on group will be able to use index like in example above ^^

Related

what is the difference between MongoDB find and aggregate in below queries?

select records using aggregate:
db.getCollection('stock_records').aggregate(
[
{
"$project": {
"info.created_date": 1,
"info.store_id": 1,
"info.store_name": 1,
"_id": 1
}
},
{
"$match": {
"$and": [
{
"info.store_id": "563dcf3465512285781608802a"
},
{
"info.created_date": {
$gt: ISODate("2021-07-18T21:07:42.313+00:00")
}
}
]
}
}
])
select records using find:
db.getCollection('stock_records').find(
{
'info.store_id':'563dcf3465512285781608802a',
'info.created_date':{ $gt:ISODate('2021-07-18T21:07:42.313+00:00')}
})
What is difference between these queries and which is best for select by id and date condition?
I think your question should be rephrased to "what's the difference between find and aggregate".
Before I dive into that I will say that both commands are similar and will perform generally the same at scale. If you want specific differences is that you did not add a project option to your find query so it will return the full document.
Regarding which is better, generally speaking unless you need a specific aggregation operator it's best to use find instead, it performs better
Now why is the aggregation framework performance "worse"? it's simple. it just does "more".
Any pipeline stage needs aggregation to fetch the BSON for the document then convert them to internal objects in the pipeline for processing - then at the end of the pipeline they are converted back to BSON and sent to the client.
This, especially for large queries has a very significant overhead compared to a find where the BSON is just sent back to the client.
Because of this, if you could execute your aggregation as a find query, you should.
Aggregation is slower than find.
In your example, Aggregation
In the first stage, you are returning all the documents with projected fields
For example, if your collection has 1000 documents, you are returning all 1000 documents each having specified projection fields. This will impact the performance of your query.
Now in the second stage, You are filtering the documents that match the query filter.
For example, out of 1000 documents from the stage 1 you select only few documents
In your example, find
First, you are filtering the documents that match the query filter.
For example, if your collection has 1000 documents, you are returning only the documents that match the query condition.
Here You did not specify the fields to return in the documents that match the query filter. Therefore the returned documents will have all fields.
You can use projection in find, instead of using aggregation
db.getCollection('stock_records').find(
{
'info.store_id': '563dcf3465512285781608802a',
'info.created_date': {
$gt: ISODate('2021-07-18T21:07:42.313+00:00')
}
},
{
"info.created_date": 1,
"info.store_id": 1,
"info.store_name": 1,
"_id": 1
}
)

Is it possible to $setOnInsert with aggregation pipeline?

MongoDB has recently added an option to perform an update operation by providing an aggregation pipeline rather than the standard modifier object. Check MongoDB's docs on this topic.
The ability to use aggregation pipeline, whose statements can refer to existing document properties, can be extremely useful in situations when certain fields needs to be evaluated based on other fields, e.g. during data migration.
Moreover, most of the standard update operators like $set, $push, $inc, etc. can be successfully replicated with the aggregation expression language so in some sense this new functionality generalizes the good old modifiers technique. Though, I must admit the pipeline can become quite verbose if one tries to do things like $addToSet. This of course brings up a whole bunch of performance related questions, but let's ignore them for now.
So far, there's been just one thing which I haven't been able to fully replicate with the aggregation pipeline update, namely the $setOnInsert operator. Let's assume that I want to perform an upsert:
db.test.update(selector, pipeline, { upsert: true });
My initial intuition was that the $$ROOT variable (which I can use in the pipeline) will equal null unless there exists a document that matches selector. Unfortunately, but probably for a good reason, MongoDB developers decided that $$ROOT should be derived from selector by default. It makes sense when you think about how normal $setOnInsert works, but it also makes it practically impossible to distinguish between an update and an insert within pipeline.
I know what you're thinking. You can look at $$ROOT._id. This is a good idea, though if _id is part of the selector it doesn't work anymore. I have figured out that this can be bypassed by tricking MongoDB a little bit and doing things like:
selector = {
_id: { $in: [value, 'fake'] },
}
instead if the simpler { _id: value }, but this doesn't look clean. Please note that if $in only contains one element, then Mongo is actually clever enough to figure out what the identifier should be and it populates $$ROOT accordingly (sic!).
I am wondering if anyone has a better idea how to approach this. Maybe there's some hidden variable that I could potentially use inside the pipeline itself to distinguish between update and insert (e.g. in $merge stage there's $$new variable which serves a similar purpose)?
If there is no matching documents, $$ROOT will have only _id field. So you can transform $$ROOT to array by its key/value pairs and check if the size of that array is equal to 1. If it is then create a new document, and if it is not then do nothing.
$objectToArray and $size to convert $$ROOT to an array by its key/value pairs and to get the size of that array
$cond to check if the size of the array above is equal to 1. If it is then merge current $$ROOT (which is only _id field) with the update object. If it is not, return the current $$ROOT. In both scenarios, put result in result feild.
$mergeObjects to merge $$ROOT and the update that you are sending, and put that in the result field
$replaceRoot to replace root to the result field from previous stage
db.collection.update({
_id: 1
},
[
{
$set: {
result: {
$cond: {
if: {
"$eq": [
{
$size: {
$objectToArray: "$$ROOT"
},
},
1
]
},
then: {
$mergeObjects: [
"$$ROOT",
{
key: 3
}
]
},
else: "$$ROOT"
},
}
}
},
{
$replaceRoot: {
newRoot: "$result"
}
}
],
{
upsert: true
})
Working example

$group which _id equals null or Array.prototype.length?

After performing a aggregation operation on a Mongo collection, my last step is to get the length of the array result. Now I have two options:
Use one more $group stage which _id equals null:
db.col.aggregate([
// ...,
{
$group: {
_id: null,
length: { $sum: 1},
},
},
]);
Or use the .length method:
db.col.aggregate([
// ...
]).length;
Both of them work well and give me the expected result. I just wonder which way is better in term of performance. What do you think?
I would use the .length method as it's likely to be an attribute in the JS Array object (it might depend on the JS engine your code is using).
I believe that using $group will make the mongo engine to process all the data and then count how many document it returns, which would be much slower.
As felix said, you can run a small benchmark and see which option is faster.

Meteor collection get last document of each selection

Currently I use the following find query to get the latest document of a certain ID
Conditions.find({
caveId: caveId
},
{
sort: {diveDate:-1},
limit: 1,
fields: {caveId: 1, "visibility.visibility":1, diveDate: 1}
});
How can I use the same using multiple ids with $in for example
I tried it with the following query. The problem is that it will limit the documents to 1 for all the found caveIds. But it should set the limit for each different caveId.
Conditions.find({
caveId: {$in: caveIds}
},
{
sort: {diveDate:-1},
limit: 1,
fields: {caveId: 1, "visibility.visibility":1, diveDate: 1}
});
One solution I came up with is using the aggregate functionality.
var conditionIds = Conditions.aggregate(
[
{"$match": { caveId: {"$in": caveIds}}},
{
$group:
{
_id: "$caveId",
conditionId: {$last: "$_id"},
diveDate: { $last: "$diveDate" }
}
}
]
).map(function(child) { return child.conditionId});
var conditions = Conditions.find({
_id: {$in: conditionIds}
},
{
fields: {caveId: 1, "visibility.visibility":1, diveDate: 1}
});
You don't want to use $in here as noted. You could solve this problem by looping through the caveIds and running the query on each caveId individually.
you're basically looking at a join query here: you need all caveIds and then lookup last for each.
This is a problem of database schema/denormalization in my opinion: (but this is only an opinion!):
You could as mentioned here, lookup all caveIds and then run the single query for each, every single time you need to look up last dives.
However I think you are much better off recording/updating the last dive inside your cave document, and then lookup all caveIds of interest pulling only the lastDive field.
That will give you immediately what you need, rather than going through expensive search/sort queries. This is at the expense of maintaining that field in the document, but it sounds like it should be fairly trivial as you only need to update the one field when a new event occurs.

sorting documents in mongodb

Let's say I have four documents in my collection:
{u'a': {u'time': 3}}
{u'a': {u'time': 5}}
{u'b': {u'time': 4}}
{u'b': {u'time': 2}}
Is it possible to sort them by the field 'time' which is common in both 'a' and 'b' documents?
Thank you
No, you should put your data into a common format so you can sort it on a common field. It can still be nested if you want but it would need to have the same path.
You can use use aggregation and the following code has been tested.
db.test.aggregate({
$project: {
time: {
"$cond": [{
"$gt": ["$a.time", null]
}, "$a.time", "$b.time"]
}
}
}, {
$sort: {
time: -1
}
});
Or if you also want the original fields returned back: gist
Alternatively you can sort once you get the result back, using a customized compare function ( not tested,for illustration purpose only)
db.eval(function() {
return db.mycollection.find().toArray().sort( function(doc1, doc2) {
var time1 = doc1.a? doc1.a.time:doc1.b.time,
time2 = doc2.a?doc2.a.time:doc2.b.time;
return time1 -time2;
})
});
You can, using the aggregation framework.
The trick here is to $project a common field to all the documents so that the $sort stage can use the value in that field to sort the documents.
The $ifNull operator can be used to check if a.time exists, it
does, then the record will be sorted by that value else, by b.time.
code:
db.t.aggregate([
{$project:{"a":1,"b":1,
"sortBy":{$ifNull:["$a.time","$b.time"]}}},
{$sort:{"sortBy":-1}},
{$project:{"a":1,"b":1}}
])
consequences of this approach:
The aggregation pipeline won't be covered by any of the index you
create.
The performance will be very poor for very large data sets.
What you could ideally do is to ask the source system that is sending you the data to standardize its format, something like:
{"a":1,"time":5}
{"b":1,"time":4}
That way your query can make use of the index if you create one on the time field.
db.t.ensureIndex({"time":-1});
code:
db.t.find({}).sort({"time":-1});