Single Field Indexes
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Single field indexes store information from a single field in a collection. By default, all collections have an index on the _id field. You can add additional indexes to speed up important queries and operations.
You can create a single-field index on any field in a document, including:
Top-level document fields
Embedded documents
Fields within embedded documents
When you create an index, you specify:
The field on which to create the index.
The sort order for the indexed values (ascending or descending).
A sort order of
1sorts values in ascending order.A sort order of
-1sorts values in descending order.
Important
Using a descending single-field index may negatively impact index performance. For best performance, only use ascending single-field indexes.
To create a single-field index, use the following prototype:
db.<collection>.createIndex( { <field>: 1 } )
This image shows an ascending index on a single field, score:
In this example, each document in the collection that has a value for
the score field is added to the index in ascending order.
You can create and manage single field indexes in the UI for deployments hosted in MongoDB Atlas.
Use Cases
If your application repeatedly runs queries on the same field, you can create an index on that field to improve performance. For example, your human resources department often needs to look up employees by employee ID. You can create an index on the employee ID field to improve the performance of that query.
Indexing commonly queried fields increases the chances of covering those queries. Covered queries are queries that can be satisfied entirely using an index, without examining any documents. This optimizes query performance.
Get Started
To create an index on a single field, see these examples: