DEV Community

ATUL KUMAR SINGH
ATUL KUMAR SINGH

Posted on

Don’t Fall Into the Trap of Too Many Indexes! 🤕

Let’s talk about MongoDB indexes and why you shouldn’t create one for every field you query. 🧐

In MongoDB, indexes are essential tools for enhancing the performance of queries. Just like in a book, where an index helps you quickly find a topic, MongoDB indexes speed up the retrieval of documents in a collection by reducing the number of documents that need to be scanned.

Imagine you're building an e-commerce platform like Amazon. You create indexes to find orders by userId, sort them by orderDate, and maybe even filter by status. But hold up ✋ —if you keep adding more indexes for every query possibility (like for productId, status, or combinations), you’re setting yourself up for trouble. 😓

Here’s why:

1. Slower Writes: Every new order has to update all those indexes. Too many? You’ll see performance drop fast, especially on high-traffic days.
2. Memory Consumption: Each index eats up memory. With too many, your server will eventually start reading from disk—performance crash incoming.

Solution? 🤔 Be selective🕵‍♂️. Use compound indexes wisely for queries that frequently involve multiple fields (like userId and orderDate). And always balance between read and write performance based on your app’s needs.

MongoDB indexes are powerful—but only if you don’t overuse them. 🚀
Happy Coding 👨‍💻

Top comments (0)