CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mongodbsearch
Jeboy
Jeboy

Reputation: 228

How to do global search in MongoDB?

What I mean as global search is searching for documents in specified collections, for example, searching for a name in both User and Organization collections and will return both user and organization documents that match the criteria.

Is it possible to simply copy the documents in User and Organization into another collection and do a search in it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3010

Answers (1)

WiredPrairie
WiredPrairie

Reputation: 59763

No, it is not possible to do a multi-collection search automatically. There's no reason however that you couldn't perform the same query on multiple collections and combine the results.

While you could duplicate the data into another collection for query purposes, if you need to be guaranteed that the source collection's values matches identically with the "index" collection, you'll need to implement your own multi-phase transaction (example) as MongoDb doesn't have a multi-collection atomic commit. Or, you can accept the fact that the "index" table may be out of sync. Of course, it could be periodically updated through custom code. Further, it means your working set has increased as you're double storing data. Also, if you then need to grab data from individual collections (to grab more of the source document), you've likely not gained anything and made things worse when compared to doing multiple queries in the first place.

You could store related documents in the same collection and take advantage of the built-in indexing offered. Of course, this comes with the caveat that if your documents are now typed, you may find it more challenging to build MongoDb indexes that are efficient. Every changing/new document must go through the indexing pipeline, which may introduce significant overhead.

If it's only a few collections, I'd just do multiple searches without understanding more deeply your requirements. If not, the second best would be to combine documents into a single collection. Last choice would be to copy the data.

Upvotes: 2

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