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Read Isolation (Read Concern)

Read Concern "snapshot"

On this page

  • Operations
  • Read Concern and Transactions
  • Read Concern and atClusterTime
  • Read Concern on Capped Collections

New in version 4.0.

Changed in version 5.0.

A snapshot is a complete copy of the data in a mongod instance at a specific point in time. You can retrieve snapshot metadata for the whole cluster or replica set, or for a single config server in a cluster. For more details, see snapshots.

Read concern "snapshot" is available for multi-document transactions, and starting in MongoDB 5.0, certain read operations outside of multi-document transactions.

  • If the transaction is not part of a causally consistent session, upon transaction commit with write concern "majority", the transaction operations are guaranteed to have read from a snapshot of majority-committed data.

  • If the transaction is part of a causally consistent session, upon transaction commit with write concern "majority", the transaction operations are guaranteed to have read from a snapshot of majority-committed data that provides causal consistency with the operation immediately preceding the transaction start.

Outside of multi-document transactions, read concern "snapshot" is available on primaries and secondaries for the following read operations:

All other read commands prohibit "snapshot".

Operations

For a list of all operations that accept read concerns, see Operations That Support Read Concern.

Read Concern and Transactions

Multi-document transactions support read concern "snapshot" as well as "local", and "majority".

Note

You set the read concern at the transaction level, not at the individual operation level. To set the read concern for transactions, see Transactions and Read Concern.

Read Concern and atClusterTime

New in version 5.0.

Outside of multi-document transactions, reads with read concern "snapshot" support the optional parameter atClusterTime. The parameter atClusterTime allows you to specify the timestamp for the read. To satisfy a read request with a specified atClusterTime of T, the mongod performs the request based on the data available at time T.

You can obtain the operationTime or clusterTime of an operation from the response of db.runCommand() or from the Session() object.

The following command performs a find operation with read concern "snapshot" and specifies that the operation should read data from the snapshot at cluster time Timestamp(1613577600, 1).

db.runCommand( {
    find: "restaurants",
    filter: { _id: 5 },
    readConcern: {
        level: "snapshot",
        atClusterTime: Timestamp(1613577600, 1)
    },
} )

If the parameter atClusterTime is not supplied, the mongos, or in single member replica sets the mongod, selects the timestamp of the latest majority-committed snapshot as the atClusterTime and returns it to the client.

Outside of transactions, "snapshot" reads are guaranteed to read from majority-committed data.

atClusterTime Considerations and Behavior

  • The allowed values for atClusterTime depend on the minSnapshotHistoryWindowInSeconds parameter. minSnapshotHistoryWindowInSeconds is the minimum time window in seconds for which the storage engine keeps the snapshot history. If you specify an atClusterTime value older than the oldest snapshot retained according to minSnapshotHistoryWindowInSeconds, mongod returns an error.

  • If you perform a read operation with "snapshot" against a delayed replica set member, the returned majority-committed data could be stale.

  • It is not possible to specify atClusterTime for "snapshot" inside of causally consistent sessions.

Read Concern on Capped Collections

Starting in version 5.0, you cannot use read concern "snapshot" when reading from a capped collection.

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Read Concern "linearizable"