MongoDB - MongoDB CRUD Operations, Delete Documents

Delete Methods

MongoDB provides the following methods to delete documents of a collection:

Method	Description
db.collection.remove()	Delete a single document or all documents that match a specified filter.
db.collection.deleteOne()	Delete at most a single document that match a specified filter even though multiple documents may match the specified filter.  New in version 3.2.
db.collection.deleteMany()	Delete all documents that match a specified filter.  New in version 3.2.

You can specify criteria, or filters, that identify the documents to delete. These filters use the same syntax as read operations:

• A query filter document can specify equality condition with <field>:<value> expressions to select all documents that contain the <field> with the specified <value>:

  { <field1>: <value1>, ... }

• A query filter document can use the query operators to specify conditions in the following form:

  { <field1>: { <operator1>: <value1> }, ... }

 

Delete Behavior

Indexes

Delete operations do not drop indexes, even if deleting all documents from a collection.

Atomicity

All write operations in MongoDB are atomic on the level of a single document. For more information on MongoDB and atomicity, see Atomicity and Transactions.

 

Example Collection

This page provides examples of remove operations in the mongo shell. To populate the users collection referenced in the examples, run the following in mongo shell:

NOTE: If the users collection already contains documents with the same _id values, you need to drop the collection (db.users.drop()) before inserting the example documents.

db.users.insertMany(
  [
     {
       _id: 1,
       name: "sue",
       age: 19,
       type: 1,
       status: "P",
       favorites: { artist: "Picasso", food: "pizza" },
       finished: [ 17, 3 ],
       badges: [ "blue", "black" ],
       points: [
          { points: 85, bonus: 20 },
          { points: 85, bonus: 10 }
       ]
     },
     {
       _id: 2,
       name: "bob",
       age: 42,
       type: 1,
       status: "A",
       favorites: { artist: "Miro", food: "meringue" },
       finished: [ 11, 25 ],
       badges: [ "green" ],
       points: [
          { points: 85, bonus: 20 },
          { points: 64, bonus: 12 }
       ]
     },
     {
       _id: 3,
       name: "ahn",
       age: 22,
       type: 2,
       status: "A",
       favorites: { artist: "Cassatt", food: "cake" },
       finished: [ 6 ],
       badges: [ "blue", "red" ],
       points: [
          { points: 81, bonus: 8 },
          { points: 55, bonus: 20 }
       ]
     },
     {
       _id: 4,
       name: "xi",
       age: 34,
       type: 2,
       status: "D",
       favorites: { artist: "Chagall", food: "chocolate" },
       finished: [ 5, 11 ],
       badges: [ "red", "black" ],
       points: [
          { points: 53, bonus: 15 },
          { points: 51, bonus: 15 }
       ]
     },
     {
       _id: 5,
       name: "xyz",
       age: 23,
       type: 2,
       status: "D",
       favorites: { artist: "Noguchi", food: "nougat" },
       finished: [ 14, 6 ],
       badges: [ "orange" ],
       points: [
          { points: 71, bonus: 20 }
       ]
     },
     {
       _id: 6,
       name: "abc",
       age: 43,
       type: 1,
       status: "A",
       favorites: { food: "pizza", artist: "Picasso" },
       finished: [ 18, 12 ],
       badges: [ "black", "blue" ],
       points: [
          { points: 78, bonus: 8 },
          { points: 57, bonus: 7 }
       ]
     }
  ]
)

View Code