Related
I'm trying to create a unique index on a collection. This unique index should apply only to documents that do not contain the deleted_at field.
I tried:
db.collection.createIndex({a: 1, b:1},
{
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {
deleted_at: {$exists: false}
}
}
)
But this raises an error saying that not is not supported in createIndex (I guess the $exists: false is converted to a $not: {$exists: true}).
I then tried a workaround:
db.collection.createIndex({a: 1, b:1},
{
unique: true,
sparse: false,
partialFilterExpression: {
deleted_at: {$type: 'null'}
}
}
)
This index is valid but does not do what I want. It only applies to documents that do contain deleted_at but have a value of null. This is not acceptable because the existing application uses queries with exists all over the place to exclude deleted stuff, so I cannot simply migrate the data to include the field setting it to null.
Does Mongo support a way to create an index, and apply that index only to documents not containing a specific field?
If the answer is no how can I try to enforce, from the DB, the uniqueness of the elements of a connection? My application will rely on the DB raising an error in case of race conditions when inserting elements.
I was wondering if there is way to force a unique collection entry but only if entry is not null.
e
Sample schema:
var UsersSchema = new Schema({
name : {type: String, trim: true, index: true, required: true},
email : {type: String, trim: true, index: true, unique: true}
});
'email' in this case is not required but if 'email' is saved I want to make sure that this entry is unique (on a database level).
Empty entries seem to get the value 'null' so every entry wih no email crashes with the 'unique' option (if there is a different user with no email).
Right now I'm solving it on an application level, but would love to save that db query.
thx
As of MongoDB v1.8+ you can get the desired behavior of ensuring unique values but allowing multiple docs without the field by setting the sparse option to true when defining the index. As in:
email : {type: String, trim: true, index: true, unique: true, sparse: true}
Or in the shell:
db.users.ensureIndex({email: 1}, {unique: true, sparse: true});
Note that a unique, sparse index still does not allow multiple docs with an email field with a value of null, only multiple docs without an email field.
See http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/index-sparse/
tl;dr
Yes, it is possible to have multiple documents with a field set to null or not defined, while enforcing unique "actual" values.
requirements:
MongoDB v3.2+.
Knowing your concrete value type(s) in advance (e.g, always a string or object when not null).
If you're not interested in the details, feel free to skip to the implementation section.
longer version
To supplement #Nolan's answer, starting with MongoDB v3.2 you can use a partial unique index with a filter expression.
The partial filter expression has limitations. It can only include the following:
equality expressions (i.e. field: value or using the $eq operator),
$exists: true expression,
$gt, $gte, $lt, $lte expressions,
$type expressions,
$and operator at the top-level only
This means that the trivial expression {"yourField"{$ne: null}} cannot be used.
However, assuming that your field always uses the same type, you can use a $type expression.
{ field: { $type: <BSON type number> | <String alias> } }
MongoDB v3.6 added support for specifying multiple possible types, which can be passed as an array:
{ field: { $type: [ <BSON type1> , <BSON type2>, ... ] } }
which means that it allows the value to be of any of a number of multiple types when not null.
Therefore, if we want to allow the email field in the example below to accept either string or, say, binary data values, an appropriate $type expression would be:
{email: {$type: ["string", "binData"]}}
implementation
mongoose
You can specify it in a mongoose schema:
const UsersSchema = new Schema({
name: {type: String, trim: true, index: true, required: true},
email: {
type: String, trim: true, index: {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {email: {$type: "string"}}
}
}
});
or directly add it to the collection (which uses the native node.js driver):
User.collection.createIndex("email", {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {
"email": {
$type: "string"
}
}
});
native mongodb driver
using collection.createIndex
db.collection('users').createIndex({
"email": 1
}, {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {
"email": {
$type: "string"
}
}
},
function (err, results) {
// ...
}
);
mongodb shell
using db.collection.createIndex:
db.users.createIndex({
"email": 1
}, {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {
"email": {$type: "string"}
}
})
This will allow inserting multiple records with a null email, or without an email field at all, but not with the same email string.
Just a quick update to those researching this topic.
The selected answer will work, but you might want to consider using partial indexes instead.
Changed in version 3.2: Starting in MongoDB 3.2, MongoDB provides the
option to create partial indexes. Partial indexes offer a superset of
the functionality of sparse indexes. If you are using MongoDB 3.2 or
later, partial indexes should be preferred over sparse indexes.
More doco on partial indexes: https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/index-partial/
Actually, only first document where "email" as field does not exist will get save successfully. Subsequent saves where "email" is not present will fail while giving error ( see code snippet below). For the reason look at MongoDB official documentation with respect to Unique Indexes and Missing Keys here at http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Indexes#Indexes-UniqueIndexes.
// NOTE: Code to executed in mongo console.
db.things.ensureIndex({firstname: 1}, {unique: true});
db.things.save({lastname: "Smith"});
// Next operation will fail because of the unique index on firstname.
db.things.save({lastname: "Jones"});
By definition unique index can only allow one value to be stored only once. If you consider null as one such value it can only be inserted once! You are correct in your approach by ensuring and validating it at application level. That is how it can be done.
You may also like to read this http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Querying+and+nulls
I want to add the unique index to a field ignoring null values in the unique indexed field and ignoring the documents that are filtered based on partialFilterExpression.
The problem is Sparse indexes can't be used with the Partial index.
Also, adding unique indexes, adds the null value to the index key field and hence the documents can't be ignored based on $exist criteria in the PartialFilterExpression.
Is it possible in MongoDB 3.2 to get around this situation?
I am adding this answer as I was looking for a solution and didn't find one. This may not answer exactly this question or may be, but will help lot of others out there like me.
Example. If the field with null is houseName and it is of type string, the solution can be like this
db.collectionName.createIndex(
{name: 1, houseName: 1},
{unique: true, partialFilterExpression: {houseName: {$type: "string"}}}
);
This will ignore the null values in the field houseName and still be unique.
Yes, you can create partial index in MongoDB 3.2
Please see https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/index-partial/#index-type-partial
MongoDB recommend usage of partial index over sparse index. I'll suggest you to drop your sparse index in favor of partial index.
You can create partial index in mongo:3.2.
Example, if ipaddress can be "", but "127.0.0.1" should be unique. The solution can be like this:
db.collectionName.createIndex(
{"ipaddress":1},
{"unique":true, "partialIndexExpression":{"ipaddress":{"$gt":""}}})
This will ignore "" values in ipaddress filed and still be unique
{
"YourField" : {
"$exists" : true,
"$gt" : "0",
"$type" : "string"
}
}
To create at mongodbCompass you must write it as JSON:
for find other types wich supports see this link.
Yes, that can be a kind of a problem that the partial filter expression cannot contain any 'not' filters.
For those who can be interested in a C# solution for an index like this, here is an example.
We have a 'User' entity, which has one-to-one 'relation' to a 'Doctor' entity.
This relation is represented by the not required, nullable field 'DoctorId' in the 'User' entity. In other words, there is a requirement that a given 'Doctor' can be linked to only single 'User' at a time.
So we need an unique index which can fire an exception when something attempts to set DoctorId to the same Guid which already set for any other 'User' entity. At the same time multiple 'null' entries must be allowed for the 'DoctorId' field, since many users do not have any doctor attached to them.
The solution to build this kind of an index looks like:
var uniqueDoctorIdIndexDefinition = new IndexKeysDefinitionBuilder<User>()
.Ascending(o => o.DoctorId);
var existsFilter = Builders<User>.Filter.Exists(o => o.DoctorId);
var notNullFilter = Builders<User>.Filter.Type(o => o.DoctorId, BsonType.String);
var andFilter = Builders<User>.Filter.And(existsFilter, notNullFilter);
var createIndexOptions = new CreateIndexOptions<User>
{
Unique = true,
Name = UniqueDoctorIdIndexName,
PartialFilterExpression = andFilter,
};
var uniqueDoctorIdIndex = new CreateIndexModel<User>(
uniqueDoctorIdIndexDefinition,
createIndexOptions);
users.Indexes.CreateOne(uniqueDoctorIdIndex);
Probably in your description of a 'User' entity you must directly specify the BsonType of the 'DoctorId' field, by using an attribute, for example in our case it was:
[BsonRepresentation(BsonType.String)]
public Guid? DoctorId { get; set; }
I am more than sure that there is a more proficient and compact solution for this problem, so would be happy if somebody suggests it here.
Here is an example that I modified from the mongoDB partial index documentation:
db.contacts.createIndex(
{ email: 1 },
{ unique: true, partialFilterExpression: { email: { $exists: true } } }
)
IMPORTANT
To use the partial index, a query must contain the filter expression (or a modified filter expression that specifies a subset of the filter expression) as part of its query condition.
You can see that queries such as:
db.contacts.find({'email':'name#email.com'}).explain()
will indicate that they doing an index scan, even if you don't specify {$exists: true} because you're implicitly specifying a subset of the partialFilterExpression by specifying an email in your filter.
On the other hand, the following query will do a collection scan:
db.contacts.find({email: {$exists: false}})
WARNING
mythicalcoder's answer (currently the highest voted answer) is very misleading because it successfully creates a unique index, but the query planner will not generally be able to use the index you've created unless you add houseName: {$type: "string"} into your filter expression. This can have performance costs which you might not be aware of and can cause problems down the road.
Want to have a i18n support for objects stored in mongodb collection
currently our schema is like:
{
_id: "id"
name: "name"
localization: [{
lan: "en-US",
name: "name_in_english"
}, {
lan: "zh-TW",
name: "name_in_traditional_chinese"
}]
}
but my thought is that field "lan" is unique, can I just use this field as a key, so the structure would be
{
_id: "id"
name: "name"
localization: {
"en-US": "name_in_english",
"zh-TW": "name_in_traditional_chinese"
}
}
which would be neater and easier to parse (just localization[language] would get the value i want for specific language).
But then the question is: Is this a good practice in storing data in MongoDB? And how to pass the json-schema check?
It is not a good practice to have values as keys. The language codes are values and as you say you can not validate them against a schema. It makes querying against it impossible. For example, you can't figure out if you have a language translation for "nl-NL" as you can't compare against keys and neither is it possible to easily index this. You should always have descriptive keys.
However, as you say, having the languages as keys makes it a lot easier to pull the data out as you can just access it by ['nl-NL'] (or whatever your language's syntax is).
I would suggest an alternative schema:
{
your_id: "id_for_name"
lan: "en-US",
name: "name_in_english"
}
{
your_id: "id_for_name"
lan: "zh-TW",
name: "name_in_traditional_chinese"
}
Now you can :
set an index on { your_id: 1, lan: 1 } for speedy lookups
query for each translation individually and just get that translation:
db.so.find( { your_id: "id_for_name", lan: 'en-US' } )
query for all the versions for each id using this same index:
db.so.find( { your_id: "id_for_name" } )
and also much easier update the translation for a specific language:
db.so.update(
{ your_id: "id_for_name", lan: 'en-US' },
{ $set: { name: "ooga" } }
)
Neither of those points are possible with your suggested schemas.
Obviously the second schema example is much better for your task (of course, if lan field is unique as you mentioned, that seems true to me also).
Getting element from dictionary/associated array/mapping/whatever_it_is_called_in_your_language is much cheaper than scanning whole array of values (and in current case it's also much efficient from the storage size point of view (remember that all fields are stored in MongoDB as-is, so every record holds the whole key name for json field, not it's representation or index or whatever).
My experience shows that MongoDB is mature enough to be used as a main storage for your application, even on high-loads (whatever it means ;) ), and the main problem is how you fight database-level locks (well, we'll wait for promised table-level locks, it'll fasten MongoDB I hope a lot more), though data loss is possible if your MongoDB cluster is built badly (dig into docs and articles over Internet for more information).
As for schema check, you must do it by means of your programming language on application side before inserting records, yeah, that's why Mongo is called schemaless.
There is a case where an object is necessarily better than an array: supporting upserts into a set. For example, if you want to update an item having name 'item1' to have val 100, or insert such an item if one doesn't exist, all in one atomic operation. With an array, you'd have to do one of two operations. Given a schema like
{ _id: 'some-id', itemSet: [ { name: 'an-item', val: 123 } ] }
you'd have commands
// Update:
db.coll.update(
{ _id: id, 'itemSet.name': 'item1' },
{ $set: { 'itemSet.$.val': 100 } }
);
// Insert:
db.coll.update(
{ _id: id, 'itemSet.name': { $ne: 'item1' } },
{ $addToSet: { 'itemSet': { name: 'item1', val: 100 } } }
);
You'd have to query first to know which is needed in advance, which can exacerbate race conditions unless you implement some versioning. With an object, you can simply do
db.coll.update({
{ _id: id },
{ $set: { 'itemSet.name': 'item1', 'itemSet.val': 100 } }
});
If this is a use case you have, then you should go with the object approach. One drawback is that querying for a specific name requires scanning. If that is also needed, you can add a separate array specifically for indexing. This is a trade-off with MongoDB. Upserts would become
db.coll.update({
{ _id: id },
{
$set: { 'itemSet.name': 'item1', 'itemSet.val': 100 },
$addToSet: { itemNames: 'item1' }
}
});
and the query would then simply be
db.coll.find({ itemNames: 'item1' })
(Note: the $ positional operator does not support array upserts.)
I was wondering if there is way to force a unique collection entry but only if entry is not null.
e
Sample schema:
var UsersSchema = new Schema({
name : {type: String, trim: true, index: true, required: true},
email : {type: String, trim: true, index: true, unique: true}
});
'email' in this case is not required but if 'email' is saved I want to make sure that this entry is unique (on a database level).
Empty entries seem to get the value 'null' so every entry wih no email crashes with the 'unique' option (if there is a different user with no email).
Right now I'm solving it on an application level, but would love to save that db query.
thx
As of MongoDB v1.8+ you can get the desired behavior of ensuring unique values but allowing multiple docs without the field by setting the sparse option to true when defining the index. As in:
email : {type: String, trim: true, index: true, unique: true, sparse: true}
Or in the shell:
db.users.ensureIndex({email: 1}, {unique: true, sparse: true});
Note that a unique, sparse index still does not allow multiple docs with an email field with a value of null, only multiple docs without an email field.
See http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/index-sparse/
tl;dr
Yes, it is possible to have multiple documents with a field set to null or not defined, while enforcing unique "actual" values.
requirements:
MongoDB v3.2+.
Knowing your concrete value type(s) in advance (e.g, always a string or object when not null).
If you're not interested in the details, feel free to skip to the implementation section.
longer version
To supplement #Nolan's answer, starting with MongoDB v3.2 you can use a partial unique index with a filter expression.
The partial filter expression has limitations. It can only include the following:
equality expressions (i.e. field: value or using the $eq operator),
$exists: true expression,
$gt, $gte, $lt, $lte expressions,
$type expressions,
$and operator at the top-level only
This means that the trivial expression {"yourField"{$ne: null}} cannot be used.
However, assuming that your field always uses the same type, you can use a $type expression.
{ field: { $type: <BSON type number> | <String alias> } }
MongoDB v3.6 added support for specifying multiple possible types, which can be passed as an array:
{ field: { $type: [ <BSON type1> , <BSON type2>, ... ] } }
which means that it allows the value to be of any of a number of multiple types when not null.
Therefore, if we want to allow the email field in the example below to accept either string or, say, binary data values, an appropriate $type expression would be:
{email: {$type: ["string", "binData"]}}
implementation
mongoose
You can specify it in a mongoose schema:
const UsersSchema = new Schema({
name: {type: String, trim: true, index: true, required: true},
email: {
type: String, trim: true, index: {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {email: {$type: "string"}}
}
}
});
or directly add it to the collection (which uses the native node.js driver):
User.collection.createIndex("email", {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {
"email": {
$type: "string"
}
}
});
native mongodb driver
using collection.createIndex
db.collection('users').createIndex({
"email": 1
}, {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {
"email": {
$type: "string"
}
}
},
function (err, results) {
// ...
}
);
mongodb shell
using db.collection.createIndex:
db.users.createIndex({
"email": 1
}, {
unique: true,
partialFilterExpression: {
"email": {$type: "string"}
}
})
This will allow inserting multiple records with a null email, or without an email field at all, but not with the same email string.
Just a quick update to those researching this topic.
The selected answer will work, but you might want to consider using partial indexes instead.
Changed in version 3.2: Starting in MongoDB 3.2, MongoDB provides the
option to create partial indexes. Partial indexes offer a superset of
the functionality of sparse indexes. If you are using MongoDB 3.2 or
later, partial indexes should be preferred over sparse indexes.
More doco on partial indexes: https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/index-partial/
Actually, only first document where "email" as field does not exist will get save successfully. Subsequent saves where "email" is not present will fail while giving error ( see code snippet below). For the reason look at MongoDB official documentation with respect to Unique Indexes and Missing Keys here at http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Indexes#Indexes-UniqueIndexes.
// NOTE: Code to executed in mongo console.
db.things.ensureIndex({firstname: 1}, {unique: true});
db.things.save({lastname: "Smith"});
// Next operation will fail because of the unique index on firstname.
db.things.save({lastname: "Jones"});
By definition unique index can only allow one value to be stored only once. If you consider null as one such value it can only be inserted once! You are correct in your approach by ensuring and validating it at application level. That is how it can be done.
You may also like to read this http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Querying+and+nulls