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analyzeShardKey

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analyzeShardKey

New in version 7.0.

Calculates metrics for evaluating a shard key for an unsharded or sharded collection. Metrics are based on sampled queries. You can use configureQueryAnalyzer to configure query sampling on a collection.

This command is available in deployments hosted in the following environments:

  • MongoDB Atlas: The fully managed service for MongoDB deployments in the cloud

Note

This command is supported in all MongoDB Atlas clusters. For information on all commands, see Unsupported Commands.

analyzeShardKey has this syntax:

db.adminCommand(
{
analyzeShardKey: <string>,
key: <shardKey>,
keyCharacteristics: <bool>,
readWriteDistribution: <bool>,
sampleRate: <double>,
sampleSize: <int>
}
)
Field
Type
Necessity
Description
analyzeShardKey
string
Required

Namespace of the collection to analyze.

There is no default value.

key
document
Required

Shard key to analyze. This can be a candidate shard key for an unsharded collection or sharded collection or the current shard key for a sharded collection.

There is no default value.

keyCharacteristics
boolean
Optional

Whether or not the metrics about the characteristics of the shard key are calculated. For details, see keyCharacteristics.

Defaults to true.

readWriteDistribution
boolean
Optional

Whether or not the metrics about the read and write distribution are calculated. For details, see readWriteDistribution.

Defaults to true.

To return read and write distribution metrics for a collection using analyzeShardKey, you must configure the query analyzer to sample the queries run on the collection. Otherwise, analyzeShardKey returns the read and write distribution metrics as 0 values. To configure the query analyzer, see configureQueryAnalyzer.

sampleRate
double
Optional

The proportion of the documents in the collection to sample when calculating the metrics about the characteristics of the shard key. If you set sampleRate, you cannot set sampleSize.

Must greater than 0, up to and including 1.

There is no default value.

sampleSize
integer
Optional

The number of documents to sample when calculating the metrics about the characteristics of the shard key. If you set sampleSize, you cannot set sampleRate.

If not specified and sampleRate is not specified, the sample size defaults to sample size set by analyzeShardKeyCharacteristicsDefaultSampleSize.

analyzeShardKey returns different metrics depending on the keyCharacteristic and readWriteDistribution values you specify when you run the method.

keyCharacteristic consists of the metrics about the cardinality, frequency, and monotonicity of the shard key. These metrics are only returned when keyCharacteristics is true.

The metrics are calculated when analyzeShardKey is run based on documents sampled from the collection. The calculation requires the shard key to have a supporting index. If there is no supporting index, no metrics are returned.

You can configure sampling with the sampleRate and sampleSize fields. Both are optional and only one can be specified. If neither is specified, the sample size is set to 10 . Configure this value by setting analyzeShardKeyCharacteristicsDefaultSampleSize.

To calculate metrics based on all documents in the collection, set the sampleRate to 1.

readWriteDistribution contains metrics about the query routing patterns and the hotness of shard key ranges. These metrics are based on sampled queries.

To configure query sampling for a collection, use the configureQueryAnalyzer command. The read and write distribution metrics are only returned if readWriteDistribution is true. The metrics are calculated when analyzeShardKey is run and the metrics use the sampled read and write queries. If there are no sampled queries, read and write distribution metrics aren't returned.

  • If there are no sampled read queries, the command returns writeDistribution but omits readDistribution.

  • If there are no sampled write queries, the command returns readDistribution but omits writeDistribution.

To return read and write distribution metrics for a collection using analyzeShardKey, you must configure the query analyzer to sample the queries run on the collection. Otherwise, analyzeShardKey returns the read and write distribution metrics as 0 values. To configure the query analyzer, see configureQueryAnalyzer.

keyCharacteristics Value
readWriteDistribution Value
Results Returned
true
false
false
true
analyzeShardKey returns readWriteDistribution metrics and omits keyCharacteristics metrics.
true
true
  • analyzeShardKey returns both readWriteDistribution metrics and keyCharacteristics metrics.

  • If the shard key doesn't have a supporting index, analyzeShardKey returns readWriteDistribution metrics and omits keyCharacteristics metrics.

analyzeShardKey does not block reads or writes to the collection.

The quality of the metrics about the read and write distribution is determined by how representative the workload is when query sampling occurs. For some applications, returning representative metrics may require leaving query sampling on for several days.

The supporting index required by analyzeShardKey is different from the supporting index required by the shardCollection command.

This table shows the supporting indexes for the same shard key for both analyzeShardKey and shardCollection:

Command
Shard Key
Supporting Indexes

analyzeShardKey

{ a.x: 1, b: "hashed" }
  • { a.x: 1, b: 1, ... }

  • { a.x: "hashed", b: 1, ... }

  • { a.x: 1, b: "hashed", ... }

  • { a.x: "hashed", b: "hashed", ...}

shardCollection
{ a.x: 1, b: "hashed" }
{ a.x: 1, b: “hashed”, ... }

This allows you to analyze a shard key that may not yet have a supporting index required for sharding it.

Both analyzeShardKey and shardCollection have the following index requirements:

To create supporting indexes, use the db.collection.createIndex() method.

To minimize the performance, run analyzeShardKey with the secondary or secondaryPreferred read preference. On a sharded cluster, mongos automatically sets the read preference to secondaryPreferred if not specified.

  • You cannot run analyzeShardKey on Atlas shared clusters and serverless instances.

  • You cannot run analyzeShardKey on standalone deployments.

  • You cannot run analyzeShardKey directly against a --shardsvr replica set. When running on a sharded cluster, analyzeShardKey must run against a mongos.

  • You cannot run analyzeShardKey against time series collections.

  • You cannot run analyzeShardKey against collections with Queryable Encryption.

analyzeShardKey requires one of these roles:

analyzeShardKey returns information regarding keyCharacteristics and readWriteDistribution.

  • keyCharacteristics provides metrics about the cardinality, frequency, and monotonicity of the shard key.

  • readWriteDistribution provides metrics about query routing patterns and the hotness of shard key ranges.

This is the structure of the keyCharacteristics document that is returned when keyCharacteristics is set to true:

{
keyCharacteristics: {
numDocsTotal: <integer>,
numOrphanDocs: <integer>,
avgDocSizeBytes: <integer>,
numDocsSampled: <integer>,
isUnique: <bool>,
numDistinctValues: <integer>,
mostCommonValues: [
{ value: <shardkeyValue>, frequency: <integer> },
...
],
monotonicity: {
recordIdCorrelationCoefficient: <double>,
type: "monotonic"|"not monotonic"|"unknown",
}
}
}
Field
Type
Description
Usage
numDocsTotal
integer
The number of documents in the collection.
numOrphanDocs
integer
The number of orphan documents.
Orphan documents are not excluded from metrics calculation for performance reasons. If numOrphanDocs is large relative to numDocsTotal, consider waiting until the number of orphan documents is very small compared to the total number of documents in the collection to run the command.
avgDocSizeBytes
integer
The average size of documents in the collection, in bytes.
If numDocsTotal is comparable to numDocsSampled, you can estimate the size of the largest chunks by multiplying the frequency of each mostCommonValues by avgDocSizeBytes.
numDocsSampled
integer
The number of sampled documents.
numDistinctValues
integer
The number of distinct shard key values.
Choose a shard key with a large numDistinctValues since the number of distinct shard key values is the maximum number of chunks that the balancer can create.
isUnique
boolean
Indicates whether the shard key is unique. This is only set to true if there is a unique index for the shard key.
If the shard key is unique, then the number of distinct values is equal to the number of documents.
mostCommonValues
array of documents
An array of value and frequency (number of documents) of the top most common shard key values.

The frequency of a shard key value is the minimum number of documents in the chunk containing that value. If the frequency is large, then the chunk can become a bottleneck for storage, reads and writes. Choose a shard key where the frequency for each most common value is low relative to numDocsSampled.

The number of most common shard key values can be configured by setting analyzeShardKeyNumMostCommonValues which defaults to 5. To avoid exceeding the 16MB BSON size limit for the response, each value is set to "truncated" if its size exceeds 15MB / analyzeShardKey NumMostCommonValues.

mostCommonValues[n].value
document
The shard key.
mostCommonValues[n].frequency
integer
The number of documents for a given shard key.
Choose a shard key where the frequency for each most common value is low relative to numDocsSampled.
monotonicity. recordIdCorrelationCoefficient
double
Only set if the monotonicity is known.

This is set to "unknown" when the one of the following is true:

  • The shard key does not have a supporting index per shardCollection definition.

  • The collection is clustered.

  • The shard key is a hashed compound shard key where the hashed field is not the first field.

The monotonicity check can return an incorrect result if the collection has gone through chunk migrations. Chunk migration deletes documents from the donor shard and re-inserts them on the recipient shard. There is no guarantee that the insertion order from the client is preserved.

You can configure the threshold for the correlation coefficient with analyzeShardKeyMonotonicity CorrelationCoefficientThreshold.

monotoncity.type
string

Can be one of:

"monotonic", "not monotonic", "unknown"

Avoid a shard key with type "monotonic" unless you do not expect to insert new documents often.

If a collection is sharded on a shard key that is monotonically increasing or decreasing, new documents will be inserted onto the shard that owns the MaxKey or MinKey chunk. That shard can become the bottleneck for inserts and the data will likely be unbalanced most of the time since the balancer will need to compete with the inserts that come in.

This is the structure of the document that is returned when readWriteDistribution is set to true:

{
readDistribution: {
sampleSize: {
total: <integer>,
find: <integer>,
aggregate: <integer>,
count: <integer>,
distinct: <integer>
},
percentageOfSingleShardReads: <double>,
percentageOfMultiShardReads: <double>,
percentageOfScatterGatherReads: <double>,
numReadsByRange: [
<integer>,
...
]
},
writeDistribution: {
sampleSize: {
total: <integer>,
update: <integer>,
delete: <integer>,
findAndModify: <integer>
},
percentageOfSingleShardWrites: <double>,
percentageOfMultiShardWrites: <double>,
percentageOfScatterGatherWrites: <double>,
numWritesByRange: [
<integer>,
...
],
percentageOfShardKeyUpdates: <double>,
percentageOfSingleWritesWithoutShardKey: <double>,
percentageOfMultiWritesWithoutShardKey: <double>
}
}

To return read and write distribution metrics for a collection using analyzeShardKey, you must configure the query analyzer to sample the queries run on the collection. Otherwise, analyzeShardKey returns the read and write distribution metrics as 0 values. To configure the query analyzer, see configureQueryAnalyzer.

Field
Type
Description
Usage
sampleSize.total
integer
Total number of sampled read queries.
sampleSize.find
integer
Total number of sampled find queries.
sampleSize.aggregate
integer
Total number of sampled aggregate queries.
sampleSize.count
integer
Total number of sampled count queries.
sampleSize.distinct
integer
Total number of sampled distinct queries.
percentageOfSingleShardReads
double
Percentage of reads that target a single shard, regardless of how the data is distributed.
percentageOfMultiShardReads
double
Percentage of reads that target multiple shards.

This category includes the reads that may target only a single shard if the data is distributed such that the values targeted by the read fall under a single shard.

If the queries operate on a large amount of data, then targeting multiple shards instead of one may result in a decrease in latency due to the parallel query execution.

percentageOfScatterGatherReads
double
Percentage of reads that are scatter-gather, regardless of how the data is distributed.

Avoid a shard key with high value for this metric. While scatter-gather queries are low-impact on the shards that do not have the target data, they still have some performance impact.

On a cluster with a large number of shards, scatter-gather queries perform significantly worse than queries that target a single shard.

numReadsByRange
array of integers
Array of numbers representing the number of times that each range sorted from MinKey to MaxKey is targeted.

Avoid a shard key where the distribution of numReadsByRange is very skewed since that implies that there is likely to be one or more hot shards for reads.

Choose a shard key where the sum of numReadsByRange is similar to sampleSize.total.

The number of ranges can be configured using the analyzeShardKeyNumRanges parameter which defaults to 100. The value is 100 because the goal is to find a shard key that scales up to 100 shards.

Field
Type
Description
Usage
sampleSize.total
integer
Total number of sampled write queries.
sampleSize.update
integer
Total number of sampled update queries.
sampleSize.delete
integer
Total number of sampled delete queries.
sampleSize.findAndModify
integer
Total number of sampled findAndModify queries.
percentageOfSingleShardWrites
double
Percentage of writes that target a single shard, regardless of how the data is distributed.
percentageOfMultiShardWrites
double
Percentage of writes that target multiple shards.
This category includes the writes that may target only a single shard if the data is distributed such that the values targeted by the write fall under a single shard.
percentageOfScatterGatherWrites
double
Percentage of writes that are scatter-gather, regardless of how the data is distributed.
Avoid a shard key with a high value for this metric because it is generally more performant for a write to target a single shard.
numWritesByRange
array of integers
Array of numbers representing the number of times that each range sorted from MinKey to MaxKey is targeted.

Avoid a shard key where the distribution of numWritesByRange is a very skewed since that implies that there is likely to be one or more hot shards for writes.

Choose a shard key where the sum of numWritesByRange is similar to sampleSize.total.

The number of ranges can be configured using the analyzeShardKeyNumRanges parameter which defaults to 100. The value is 100 because the goal is to find a shard key that scales up to 100 shards.

percentageOfShardKeyUpdates
double
Percentage of write queries that update a document’s shard key value.

Avoid a shard key with a high percentageOfShardKeyUpdates. Updates to a document’s shard key value may cause the document to move to a different shard, which requires executing an internal transaction on the shard that the query targets. For details on changing a document's shard key value, see Change a Shard Key.

Updates are currently only supported as retryable writes or in a transaction, and have a batch size limit of 1.

percentageOfSingleWritesWithoutShardKey
double
The percentage of write queries that are multi=false and not targetable to a single shard.

Avoid a shard key with a high value for this metric.

Performing this type of write is expensive because they can involve running internal transactions.

percentageOfMultiWritesWithoutShardKey
double
The percentage of write queries that are multi=true and not targetable to a single shard.
Avoid a shard key with a high value for this metric.

Consider a simplified version of a social media app. The collection we are trying to shard is the post collection.

Documents in the post collection have the following schema:

{
userId: <uuid>,
firstName: <string>,
lastName: <string>,
body: <string>, // the field that can be modified.
date: <date>, // the field that can be modified.
}
  • The app has 1500 users.

  • There are 30 last names and 45 first names, some more common than others.

  • There are three celebrity users.

  • Each user follows exactly five other users and has a very high probability of following at least one celebrity user.

  • Each user posts about two posts a day at random times. They edit each post once, right after it is posted.

  • Each user logs in every six hours to read their own profile and posts by the users they follow from the past 24 hours. They also reply under a random post from the past three hours.

  • For every user, the app removes posts that are more than three days old at midnight.

This workload has the following query patterns:

  • find command with filter { userId: , firstName: , lastName: }

  • find command with filter { $or: [{ userId: , firstName: , lastName:, date: { $gte: }, ] }

  • findAndModify command with filter { userId: , firstName: , lastName: , date: } to update the body and date field.

  • update command with multi: false and filter { userId: , firstName: , lastName: , date: { $gte: , $lt: } } to update the body and date field.

  • delete command with multi: true and filter { userId: , firstName: , lastName: , date: { $lt: } }

Below are example metrics returned by analyzeShardKey for some candidate shard keys, with sampled queries collected from seven days of workload.

Note

Before you run analyzeShardKey commands, read the Supporting Indexes section earlier on this page. If you require supporting indexes for the shard key you are analyzing, use the db.collection.createIndex() method to create the indexes.

This analyzeShardKey command provides metrics on the { lastName: 1 } shard key on the social.post collection:

use social
db.post.analyzeShardKey(
{
key: { lastName: 1 },
keyCharacteristics: true,
readWriteDistribution: false,
}
)

The output for this command is similar to the following:

{
"keyCharacteristics": {
"numDocsTotal" : 9039,
"avgDocSizeBytes" : 153,
"numDocsSampled" : 9039,
"isUnique" : false,
"numDistinctValues" : 30,
"mostCommonValues" : [
{
"value" : {
"lastName" : "Smith"
},
"frequency" : 1013
},
{
"value" : {
"lastName" : "Johnson"
},
"frequency" : 984
},
{
"value" : {
"lastName" : "Jones"
},
"frequency" : 962
},
{
"value" : {
"lastName" : "Brown"
},
"frequency" : 925
},
{
"value" : {
"lastName" : "Davies"
},
"frequency" : 852
}
],
"monotonicity" : {
"recordIdCorrelationCoefficient" : 0.0771959161,
"type" : "not monotonic"
},
}
}

This analyzeShardKey command provides metrics on the { userId: 1 } shard key on the social.post collection:

db.adminCommand(
{
analyzeShardKey: "social.post",
key: { userId: 1 },
keyCharacteristics: true,
readWriteDistribution: false
}
)

The output for this command is similar to the following:

{
"keyCharacteristics": {
"numDocsTotal" : 9039,
"avgDocSizeBytes" : 162,
"numDocsSampled" : 9039,
"isUnique" : false,
"numDistinctValues" : 1495,
"mostCommonValues" : [
{
"value" : {
"userId" : UUID("aadc3943-9402-4072-aae6-ad551359c596")
},
"frequency" : 15
},
{
"value" : {
"userId" : UUID("681abd2b-7a27-490c-b712-e544346f8d07")
},
"frequency" : 14
},
{
"value" : {
"userId" : UUID("714cb722-aa27-420a-8d63-0d5db962390d")
},
"frequency" : 14
},
{
"value" : {
"userId" : UUID("019a4118-b0d3-41d5-9c0a-764338b7e9d1")
},
"frequency" : 14
},
{
"value" : {
"userId" : UUID("b9c9fbea-3c12-41aa-bc69-eb316047a790")
},
"frequency" : 14
}
],
"monotonicity" : {
"recordIdCorrelationCoefficient" : -0.0032039729,
"type" : "not monotonic"
},
}
}

This analyzeShardKey command provides metrics on the { userId: 1 } shard key on the social.post collection:

db.adminCommand(
{
analyzeShardKey: "social.post",
key: { userId: 1 },
keyCharacteristics: false,
readWriteDistribution: true
}
)

The output for this command is similar to the following:

{
"readDistribution" : {
"sampleSize" : {
"total" : 61363,
"find" : 61363,
"aggregate" : 0,
"count" : 0,
"distinct" : 0
},
"percentageOfSingleShardReads" : 50.0008148233,
"percentageOfMultiShardReads" : 49.9991851768,
"percentageOfScatterGatherReads" : 0,
"numReadsByRange" : [
688,
775,
737,
776,
652,
671,
1332,
1407,
535,
428,
985,
573,
1496,
...
],
},
"writeDistribution" : {
"sampleSize" : {
"total" : 49638,
"update" : 30680,
"delete" : 7500,
"findAndModify" : 11458
},
"percentageOfSingleShardWrites" : 100,
"percentageOfMultiShardWrites" : 0,
"percentageOfScatterGatherWrites" : 0,
"numWritesByRange" : [
389,
601,
430,
454,
462,
421,
668,
833,
493,
300,
683,
460,
...
],
"percentageOfShardKeyUpdates" : 0,
"percentageOfSingleWritesWithoutShardKey" : 0,
"percentageOfMultiWritesWithoutShardKey" : 0
}
}

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