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Indexes

Manage Indexes

On this page

  • View Existing Indexes
  • Remove Indexes
  • Modify an Index
  • Find Inconsistent Indexes Across Shards

This page shows how to manage existing indexes. For instructions on creating indexes, refer to the specific index type pages.

View Existing Indexes

The following sections provide methods for viewing existing indexes on a collection or an entire database.

List All Indexes on a Collection

To return a list of all indexes on a collection, use the db.collection.getIndexes() method or a similar method for your driver.

For example, to view all indexes on the people collection, run the following command:

db.people.getIndexes()

List All Indexes for a Database

To list all the collection indexes in a database, run the following command in mongosh:

db.getCollectionNames().forEach(function(collection) {
    indexes = db[collection].getIndexes();
    print("Indexes for " + collection + ":");
    printjson(indexes);
});

List Specific Type of Indexes

To list all indexes of a certain type (such as hashed or text) for all collections in all database, run the following command in mongosh:

// The following finds all hashed indexes
db.adminCommand("listDatabases").databases.forEach(function(d){
    let mdb = db.getSiblingDB(d.name);
    mdb.getCollectionInfos({ type: "collection" }).forEach(function(c){
      let currentCollection = mdb.getCollection(c.name);
      currentCollection.getIndexes().forEach(function(idx){
        let idxValues = Object.values(Object.assign({}, idx.key));
        if (idxValues.includes("hashed")) {
          print("Hashed index: " + idx.name + " on " + d.name + "." + c.name);
          printjson(idx);
        };
      });
    });
});

To view a list of all indexes on a collection in MongoDB Compass, click on the target collection in the left-hand pane and select the Indexes tab.

View indexes on a collection in Compass

For details on the information displayed in this tab, refer to the Compass documentation.

Remove Indexes

Tip

Hide an Index Before Dropping It

If you drop an index that is actively used in production, your application may incur a performance degradation. Before you drop an index, you can evaluate the potential impact of the drop by hiding the index.

Hidden indexes are not used to support queries. If you hide an index and observe substantial negative performance impact, consider keeping and unhiding the index so queries can resume using it.

When removing indexes in the MongoDB Shell, you can either:

  • Remove a specific index.

  • Remove all indexes from the collection.

Remove Specific Index

To remove an index, use the db.collection.dropIndex() method.

For example, the following operation removes an ascending index on the tax-id field in the accounts collection:

db.accounts.dropIndex( { "tax-id": 1 } )

The operation returns a document with the status of the operation:

{ "nIndexesWas" : 3, "ok" : 1 }

Where the value of nIndexesWas reflects the number of indexes before removing this index.

For text indexes, pass the index name to the db.collection.dropIndex() method. See Use the Index Name to Drop a text Index for details.

Note

db.collection.dropIndexes() can accept an array of index names.

db.collection.dropIndexes() can stop in-progress index builds. See Stop In-Progress Index Builds for more information.

Remove All Indexes

You can also use the db.collection.dropIndexes() to remove all indexes except for the _id index from a collection.

For example, the following command removes all indexes from the accounts collection:

db.accounts.dropIndexes()

These shell helpers provide wrappers around the dropIndexes database command. Your client library may have a different or additional interface for these operations.

To remove an index from a collection in MongoDB Compass:

  1. Navigate to the collection containing the target index.

  2. Click the Indexes tab.

  3. In the Drop column for the target index, click the trash icon.

Delete an index in Compass

Modify an Index

To modify an existing index in the MongoDB Shell, you need to drop and recreate the index. The exception to this rule is TTL indexes, which can be modified via the collMod command in conjunction with the index collection flag.

To modify an existing index in MongoDB Compass, you need to drop and recreate the index.

Minimize Performance Impact With a Temporary Index

If you drop an index that is actively used in production, your application may incur a performance degradation. To ensure queries can still use an index during modification, you can create a temporary, redundant index that contains the same fields as the modified index.

Example

This example creates a new index and modifies that index to make it unique.

1
Create a siteAnalytics collection with an index on the url field

Run this command:

db.siteAnalytics.createIndex( { "url": 1 } )

The command returns the name of the index:

url_1
2
Create a temporary index that contains the url field

Run this command:

db.siteAnalytics.createIndex( { "url": 1, "dummyField": 1 } )

The command returns the name of the index:

url_1_dummyField_1

This temporary index lets you safely drop the original { "url": 1 } index without impacting performance.

3
Drop the original index

Run this command:

db.siteAnalytics.dropIndex( { "url": 1 } )

The command returns:

{ nIndexesWas: 3, ok: 1 }
4
Recreate the { "url": 1 } index with the unique property

Run this command:

db.siteAnalytics.createIndex( { "url": 1 }, { "unique": true } )

The command returns the name of the index:

url_1

The url_1 index is recreated and you can drop the temporary index without impacting performance. Queries on the url field can use the new unique index.

5
Drop the temporary index

Run this command:

db.siteAnalytics.dropIndex( { "url": 1, "dummyField": 1 } )

The command returns:

{ nIndexesWas: 3, ok: 1 }
6
Confirm that the index was updated

To view the indexes on the siteAnalytics collection, run this command:

db.siteAnalytics.getIndexes()

The command returns these indexes, indicating that the url_1 index is now unique:

[
  { v: 2, key: { _id: 1 }, name: '_id_' },
  { v: 2, key: { url: 1 }, name: 'url_1', unique: true }
]

Find Inconsistent Indexes Across Shards

A sharded collection has an inconsistent index if the collection does not have the exact same indexes (including the index options) on each shard that contains chunks for the collection. Although inconsistent indexes should not occur during normal operations, inconsistent indexes can occur , such as:

  • When a user is creating an index with a unique key constraint and one shard contains a chunk with duplicate documents. In such cases, the create index operation may succeed on the shards without duplicates but not on the shard with duplicates.

  • When a user is creating an index across the shards in a rolling manner (i.e. manually building the index one by one across the shards) but either fails to build the index for an associated shard or incorrectly builds an index with different specification.

The config server primary, by default, checks for index inconsistencies across the shards for sharded collections, and the command serverStatus, when run on the config server primary, returns the field shardedIndexConsistency field to report on the number of sharded collections with index inconsistencies.

If shardedIndexConsistency reports any index inconsistencies, you can run the following pipeline for your sharded collections until you find the inconsistencies.

  1. Define the following aggregation pipeline:

    const pipeline = [
        // Get indexes and the shards that they belong to.
        {$indexStats: {}},
        // Attach a list of all shards which reported indexes to each document from $indexStats.
        {$group: {_id: null, indexDoc: {$push: "$$ROOT"}, allShards: {$addToSet: "$shard"}}},
        // Unwind the generated array back into an array of index documents.
        {$unwind: "$indexDoc"},
        // Group by index name.
        {
            $group: {
                "_id": "$indexDoc.name",
                "shards": {$push: "$indexDoc.shard"},
                // Convert each index specification into an array of its properties
                // that can be compared using set operators.
                "specs": {$push: {$objectToArray: {$ifNull: ["$indexDoc.spec", {}]}}},
                "allShards": {$first: "$allShards"}
            }
        },
        // Compute which indexes are not present on all targeted shards and
        // which index specification properties aren't the same across all shards.
        {
            $project: {
                missingFromShards: {$setDifference: ["$allShards", "$shards"]},
                inconsistentProperties: {
                     $setDifference: [
                         {$reduce: {
                             input: "$specs",
                             initialValue: {$arrayElemAt: ["$specs", 0]},
                             in: {$setUnion: ["$$value", "$$this"]}}},
                         {$reduce: {
                             input: "$specs",
                             initialValue: {$arrayElemAt: ["$specs", 0]},
                             in: {$setIntersection: ["$$value", "$$this"]}}}
                     ]
                 }
            }
        },
        // Only return output that indicates an index was inconsistent, i.e. either a shard was missing
        // an index or a property on at least one shard was not the same on all others.
        {
            $match: {
                $expr:
                    {$or: [
                        {$gt: [{$size: "$missingFromShards"}, 0]},
                        {$gt: [{$size: "$inconsistentProperties"}, 0]},
                    ]
                }
            }
        },
        // Output relevant fields.
        {$project: {_id: 0, indexName: "$$ROOT._id", inconsistentProperties: 1, missingFromShards: 1}}
    ];

  2. Run the aggregation pipeline for the sharded collection to test. For example, to test if the sharded collection test.reviews has inconsistent indexes across its associated shards:

    db.getSiblingDB("test").reviews.aggregate(pipeline)

    If the collection has inconsistent indexes, the aggregation for that collection returns details regarding the inconsistent indexes:

    { "missingFromShards" : [ "shardB" ], "inconsistentProperties" : [ ], "indexName" : "page_1_score_1" }
    { "missingFromShards" : [ ], "inconsistentProperties" : [ { "k" : "expireAfterSeconds", "v" : 60 }, { "k" : "expireAfterSeconds", "v" : 600 } ], "indexName" : "reviewDt_1" }

    The returned documents indicate two inconsistencies for the sharded collection test.reviews:

    1. An index named page_1_score_1 is missing from the collection on shardB.

    2. An index named reviewDt_1 has inconsistent properties across the collection's shards, specifically, the expireAfterSeconds properties differ.

To resolve the inconsistency where an index is missing from the collection on a particular shard(s),

You can either:

To resolve where the index properties differ across the shards,

Drop the incorrect index from the collection on the affected shard(s) and rebuild the index. To rebuild the index, you can either:

Alternatively, if the inconsistency is the expireAfterSeconds property, you can run the collMod command to update the number of seconds instead of dropping and rebuilding the index.

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