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System Collections

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  • Synopsis
  • Collections
  • Database-Specific Collections

Synopsis

MongoDB stores system information in collections that use the <database>.system.* namespace, which MongoDB reserves for internal use. Do not create collections that begin with system.

MongoDB also stores some additional instance-local metadata in the local database, specifically for replication purposes and in the config database for sessions information.

Collections

System collections include these collections stored in the admin database:

admin.system.roles

The admin.system.roles collection stores custom roles that administrators create and assign to users to provide access to specific resources.

admin.system.users

The admin.system.users collection stores the user's authentication credentials as well as any roles assigned to the user. Users may define authorization roles in the admin.system.roles collection.

admin.system.version

The admin.system.version collection stores metadata to support internal operations. Do not modify this collection unless specifically instructed to in this documentation or by a MongoDB support engineer.

System collections include these collections stored in the config database:

config.system.indexBuilds

The indexBuilds collection stores information related to in-progress index builds.

Database-Specific Collections

System collections also include these collections stored directly in each database:

<database>.system.buckets

Stores the underlying data associated to a time series collection. The system.buckets collection stores data in an optimized format and schema for an efficient representation of the persisted time series data.

Do not modify this collection.

<database>.system.namespaces

Note

Removed in 4.2

Starting in MongoDB 4.2, <database>.system.namespaces has been removed (access to the collection has been deprecated since 3.0). To list the collections in a database, use the listCollections command instead.

<database>.system.indexes

Note

Removed in 4.2

Starting in MongoDB 4.2, <database>.system.indexes has been removed (access to the collection has been deprecated since 3.0). To list the indexes, use the listIndexes command instead.

<database>.system.profile

The <database>.system.profile collection stores database profiling information. For information on profiling, see Database Profiler.

<database>.system.js

The <database>.system.js collection stores special JavaScript code for use in server side JavaScript. See Store a JavaScript Function on the Server for more information.

<database>.system.views

The <database>.system.views collection contains information about each view in the database.

Starting in MongoDB 5.0, for featureCompatibilityVersion set to "5.0" or greater, users can no longer write directly to the <database>.system.views collection.

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