Spring Data MongoDB Indexed(unique=true)

Question

I'm having a lot of problems with Spring Data and MongoDB when it comes to an Indexed field.

I've gone over the docs, but they aren't very good at explaining the difference between @Indexed(unique=true) and @Indexed(unique=false).

I have a field that I wanted indexed so I can execute fast queries against it. In this case it's email address which generally should be unique, but it's possible for the emailAddress to be null for a period.

However, once one record as a null emailAddress I can't have any other records with a null emailAddress. Spring Data refuses to insert any additional records with null emailAddresses. And it fails to throw anything that it didn't work.

Right now I have it set to unique=true, but I'm contemplating setting it to unique=false to get around this problem.

Will this fix the problem?

And what other problems could I be adding by relaxing this?

Will MongoDB allow me to have multiple email addresses that are equal and still be fast at querying?

JohnnyHK · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-18 16:46:30Z

14

From mongodb docs: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/indexes/#unique-indexes

So if you have a unique key, don't set it to null.

To be honest, in your use case(email field), I believe you don't need to use unique key, you could use sparse key, instead, so, docs that don't have email wont take up your btree index, which is going to save you space, and increase the lookup speed.

edited Dec 18, 2012 at 16:46

JohnnyHK

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answered Dec 16, 2012 at 20:21

Arthur Neves

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