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Can someone confirm that there is no such thing as a case insensitive index/search in Mongo? If true it seems likely that the author's comments have some degree

Can someone confirm that there is no such thing as a case insensitive index/search in Mongo? If true it seems likely that the author's comments have some degree of truth, at least when it comes to its usefulness for web and mobile applications. Storing data only lowercase isn't a good a idea for obvious reasons, and storing two copies of the same data for searching only, while not the end of the world, seems a little silly.

zemo 14y ago
case-insensitive regex searches are supported.
- lucasjans 14y ago
  Do you know why are case-insensitive searches not recommended? What's the realistic work-around?
  - parfe 14y ago
    http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Advanced+Queries#AdvancedQueries-RegularExpressions http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Advanced+Queries#Advance... Regex queries ending with /i (case-insensitive flag) cannot efficiently use indexes, but must do full index scans.
  - ericcholis 14y ago
    I've found that a simple {"lastname":/cholis/i} works great. However, trying to do the same thing for a multi-key search isn't ideal. Specifically, searching for 3 words in a title using $and with multiple regex queries on a collection with 100,000+ documents took about 520 ms. The mongodb documentation suggests that you could have an array with your keywords, generated from the field you wish to search. Using indexes on multikeys would make this faster, but your index size would be much larger.[1] For my project, I'm likely going to institute solution like elasticsearch or SOLR. [1] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Full+Text+Search+in+Mongo http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Full+Text+Search+in+Mong...
    - sureshv 14y ago
      Building over a full text search engine that indexes your db is going to scale much better in the long run. Plus you get stemming and other niceties to boot as long as consistency is not of the highest priority.
      - r00fus 14y ago
        With tools like SOLR or Elasticsearch, I keep wondering why people try to re-invent the full-text indexing wheel - these tools make it easy to focus your app/datastore on your functionality and leave search as an additional service, to be used whenever you need it.
  - sureshv 14y ago
    The documentation mentions that prefix searches will be much faster than other searches. Most likely reason is that the index is mapped with some sort of prefix tree, perhaps a case-sensitive prefix tree.

zemo 14y ago

case-insensitive regex searches are supported.

lucasjans 14y ago
Do you know why are case-insensitive searches not recommended? What's the realistic work-around?
- parfe 14y ago
  http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Advanced+Queries#AdvancedQueries-RegularExpressions http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Advanced+Queries#Advance... Regex queries ending with /i (case-insensitive flag) cannot efficiently use indexes, but must do full index scans.
- ericcholis 14y ago
  I've found that a simple {"lastname":/cholis/i} works great. However, trying to do the same thing for a multi-key search isn't ideal. Specifically, searching for 3 words in a title using $and with multiple regex queries on a collection with 100,000+ documents took about 520 ms. The mongodb documentation suggests that you could have an array with your keywords, generated from the field you wish to search. Using indexes on multikeys would make this faster, but your index size would be much larger.[1] For my project, I'm likely going to institute solution like elasticsearch or SOLR. [1] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Full+Text+Search+in+Mongo http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Full+Text+Search+in+Mong...
  - sureshv 14y ago
    Building over a full text search engine that indexes your db is going to scale much better in the long run. Plus you get stemming and other niceties to boot as long as consistency is not of the highest priority.
    - r00fus 14y ago
      With tools like SOLR or Elasticsearch, I keep wondering why people try to re-invent the full-text indexing wheel - these tools make it easy to focus your app/datastore on your functionality and leave search as an additional service, to be used whenever you need it.
- sureshv 14y ago
  The documentation mentions that prefix searches will be much faster than other searches. Most likely reason is that the index is mapped with some sort of prefix tree, perhaps a case-sensitive prefix tree.