Bit of an odd one on query performance... I need to run a query which does a total count of documents, and can also return a result set that can be limited and offset.
So, I have 57 documents in total, and the user wants 10 documents offset by 20.
I can think of 2 ways of doing this, first is query for all 57 documents (returned as an array), then using array.slice return the documents they want. The second option is to run 2 queries, the first one using mongo's native 'count' method, then run a second query using mongo's native $limit and $skip aggregators.
Which do you think would scale better? Doing it all in one query, or running two separate ones?
Edit:
// 1 query
var limit = 10;
var offset = 20;
Animals.find({}, function (err, animals) {
if (err) {
return next(err);
}
res.send({count: animals.length, animals: animals.slice(offset, limit + offset)});
});
// 2 queries
Animals.find({}, {limit:10, skip:20} function (err, animals) {
if (err) {
return next(err);
}
Animals.count({}, function (err, count) {
if (err) {
return next(err);
}
res.send({count: count, animals: animals});
});
});
I suggest you to use 2 queries:
db.collection.count()
will return total number of items. This value is stored somewhere in Mongo and it is not calculated.
db.collection.find().skip(20).limit(10)
here I assume you could use a sort by some field, so do not forget to add an index on this field. This query will be fast too.
I think that you shouldn't query all items and than perform skip and take, cause later when you have big data you will have problems with data transferring and processing.
After having to tackle this issue myself, I would like to build upon user854301's answer.
Mongoose ^4.13.8 I was able to use a function called toConstructor()
which allowed me to avoid building the query multiple times when filters are applied. I know this function is available in older versions too but you'll have to check the Mongoose docs to confirm this.
The following uses Bluebird promises:
let schema = Query.find({ name: 'bloggs', age: { $gt: 30 } });
// save the query as a 'template'
let query = schema.toConstructor();
return Promise.join(
schema.count().exec(),
query().limit(limit).skip(skip).exec(),
function (total, data) {
return { data: data, total: total }
}
);
Now the count query will return the total records it matched and the data returned will be a subset of the total records.
Please note the () around query() which constructs the query.