Create Indexes to Support Your Queries

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Create a Single-Key Index if All Queries Use the Same, Single Key

Create Compound Indexes to Support Several Different Queries
Create Indexes to Support Text Search
Index Use and Collation

An index supports a query when the index contains all the fields scanned by the query. The query scans the index and not the collection. Creating indexes that support queries results in greatly increased query performance.

This document describes strategies for creating indexes that support queries.

Create a Single-Key Index if All Queries Use the Same, Single Key

If you only ever query on a single key in a given collection, then you need to create just one single-key index for that collection. For example, you might create an index on category in the product collection:

db.products.createIndex( { "category": 1 } )

Create Compound Indexes to Support Several Different Queries

If you sometimes query on only one key and at other times query on that key combined with a second key, then creating a compound index is more efficient than creating a single-key index. MongoDB will use the compound index for both queries. For example, you might create an index on both category and item.

db.products.createIndex( { "category": 1, "item": 1 } )

This allows you both options. You can query on just category, and you also can query on category combined with item. A single compound index on multiple fields can support all the queries that search a "prefix" subset of those fields.

Example

The following index on a collection:

{ x: 1, y: 1, z: 1 }

Can support queries that the following indexes support:

{ x: 1 }
{ x: 1, y: 1 }

There are some situations where the prefix indexes may offer better query performance: for example if z is a large array.

The { x: 1, y: 1, z: 1 } index can also support many of the same queries as the following index:

{ x: 1, z: 1 }

Also, { x: 1, z: 1 } has an additional use. Given the following query:

db.collection.find( { x: 5 } ).sort( { z: 1} )

The { x: 1, z: 1 } index supports both the query and the sort operation, while the { x: 1, y: 1, z: 1 } index only supports the query. For more information on sorting, see Use Indexes to Sort Query Results.

Create Indexes to Support Text Search

For data hosted on MongoDB Atlas, you can support full-text search with Atlas Search indexes. To learn more, see Create an Atlas Search Index.

For self-managed (non-Atlas) deployments, MongoDB provides a text index type that supports searching for string content in a collection. To learn more about self-managed text indexes, see Text Indexes.

Index Use and Collation

To use an index for string comparisons, an operation must also specify the same collation. That is, an index with a collation cannot support an operation that performs string comparisons on the indexed fields if the operation specifies a different collation.

Warning

Because indexes that are configured with collation use ICU collation keys to achieve sort order, collation-aware index keys may be larger than index keys for indexes without collation.

For example, the collection myColl has an index on a string field category with the collation locale "fr".

db.myColl.createIndex( { category: 1 }, { collation: { locale: "fr" } } )

The following query operation, which specifies the same collation as the index, can use the index:

db.myColl.find( { category: "cafe" } ).collation( { locale: "fr" } )

However, the following query operation, which by default uses the "simple" binary collator, cannot use the index:

db.myColl.find( { category: "cafe" } )

For a compound index where the index prefix keys are not strings, arrays, and embedded documents, an operation that specifies a different collation can still use the index to support comparisons on the index prefix keys.

For example, the collection myColl has a compound index on the numeric fields score and price and the string field category; the index is created with the collation locale "fr" for string comparisons:

db.myColl.createIndex(
   { score: 1, price: 1, category: 1 },
   { collation: { locale: "fr" } } )

The following operations, which use "simple" binary collation for string comparisons, can use the index:

db.myColl.find( { score: 5 } ).sort( { price: 1 } )
db.myColl.find( { score: 5, price: { $gt: NumberDecimal( "10" ) } } ).sort( { price: 1 } )

The following operation, which uses "simple" binary collation for string comparisons on the indexed category field, can use the index to fulfill only the score: 5 portion of the query:

db.myColl.find( { score: 5, category: "cafe" } )

Back

The ESR (Equality, Sort, Range) Rule

Use Indexes to Sort Query Results