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• Considerations
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Definition

createIndexes

Builds one or more indexes on a collection.

The createIndexes command takes the following form:

copy

db.runCommand(
  {
    createIndexes: <collection>,
    indexes: [
        {
            key: {
                <key-value_pair>,
                <key-value_pair>,
                ...
            },
            name: <index_name>,
            <option1>,
            <option2>,
            ...
        },
        { ... },
        { ... }
    ],
    writeConcern: { <write concern> }
  }
)

The createIndexes command takes the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
createIndexes	string	The collection for which to create indexes.
indexes	array	Specifies the indexes to create. Each document in the array specifies a separate index.
writeConcern	document	Optional. A document expressing the write concern. Omit to use the default write concern. New in version 3.4.

Each document in the indexes array can take the following fields:

Changed in version 3.0: The dropDups option is no longer available.

Field	Type	Description
key	document	Specifies the index’s fields. For each field, specify a key-value pair in which the key is the name of the field to index and the value is either the index direction or index type. If specifying direction, specify 1 for ascending or -1 for descending.
name	string	A name that uniquely identifies the index.
background	boolean	Optional. Builds the index in the background so the operation does not block other database activities. Specify true to build in the background. The default value is false.
unique	boolean	Optional. Creates a unique index so that the collection will not accept insertion or update of documents where the index key value matches an existing value in the index. Specify true to create a unique index. The default value is false. The option is unavailable for hashed indexes.
partialFilterExpression	document	Optional. If specified, the index only references documents that match the filter expression. See Partial Indexes for more information. A filter expression can include: equality expressions (i.e. field: value or using the $eq operator), $exists: true expression, $gt, $gte, $lt, $lte expressions, $type expressions, $and operator at the top-level only You can specify a partialFilterExpression option for all MongoDB index types. New in version 3.2.
sparse	boolean	Optional. If true, the index only references documents with the specified field. These indexes use less space but behave differently in some situations (particularly sorts). The default value is false. See Sparse Indexes for more information. Changed in version 3.2: Starting in MongoDB 3.2, MongoDB provides the option to create partial indexes. Partial indexes offer a superset of the functionality of sparse indexes. If you are using MongoDB 3.2 or later, partial indexes should be preferred over sparse indexes. Changed in version 2.6: 2dsphere indexes are sparse by default and ignore this option. For a compound index that includes 2dsphere index key(s) along with keys of other types, only the 2dsphere index fields determine whether the index references a document. 2d, geoHaystack, and text indexes behave similarly to the 2dsphere indexes.
expireAfterSeconds	integer	Optional. Specifies a value, in seconds, as a TTL to control how long MongoDB retains documents in this collection. See Expire Data from Collections by Setting TTL for more information on this functionality. This applies only to TTL indexes.
storageEngine	document	Optional. Allows users to configure the storage engine on a per-index basis when creating an index. The storageEngine option should take the following form: copy storageEngine: { <storage-engine-name>: <options> } Storage engine configuration options specified when creating indexes are validated and logged to the oplog during replication to support replica sets with members that use different storage engines. New in version 3.0.
weights	document	Optional. For text indexes, a document that contains field and weight pairs. The weight is an integer ranging from 1 to 99,999 and denotes the significance of the field relative to the other indexed fields in terms of the score. You can specify weights for some or all the indexed fields. See Control Search Results with Weights to adjust the scores. The default value is 1.
default_language	string	Optional. For text indexes, the language that determines the list of stop words and the rules for the stemmer and tokenizer. See Text Search Languages for the available languages and Specify a Language for Text Index for more information and examples. The default value is english.
language_override	string	Optional. For text indexes, the name of the field, in the collection’s documents, that contains the override language for the document. The default value is language. See Use any Field to Specify the Language for a Document for an example.
textIndexVersion	integer	Optional. The text index version number. Users can use this option to override the default version number. For available versions, see Versions. New in version 2.6.
2dsphereIndexVersion	integer	Optional. The 2dsphere index version number. Users can use this option to override the default version number. For the available versions, see Versions. New in version 2.6.
bits	integer	Optional. For 2d indexes, the number of precision of the stored geohash value of the location data. The bits value ranges from 1 to 32 inclusive. The default value is 26.
min	number	Optional. For 2d indexes, the lower inclusive boundary for the longitude and latitude values. The default value is -180.0.
max	number	Optional. For 2d indexes, the upper inclusive boundary for the longitude and latitude values. The default value is 180.0.
bucketSize	number	For geoHaystack indexes, specify the number of units within which to group the location values; i.e. group in the same bucket those location values that are within the specified number of units to each other. The value must be greater than 0.
collation	document	Optional. Specifies the collation for the index. Collation allows users to specify language-specific rules for string comparison, such as rules for lettercase and accent marks. If you have specified a collation at the collection level, then: If you do not specify a collation when creating the index, MongoDB creates the index with the collection’s default collation. If you do specify a collation when creating the index, MongoDB creates the index with the specified collation. The collation option has the following syntax: copy collation: { locale: <string>, caseLevel: <boolean>, caseFirst: <string>, strength: <int>, numericOrdering: <boolean>, alternate: <string>, maxVariable: <string>, backwards: <boolean> } When specifying collation, the locale field is mandatory; all other collation fields are optional. For descriptions of the fields, see Collation Document. New in version 3.4.

The mongo shell provides the methods db.collection.createIndex() and db.collection.createIndexes() as wrappers for the createIndexes command.

Considerations

Behavior