Thank you for your thoughtful response and suggestion to separate createCollection permissions from insert permissions. This approach indeed introduces a clear separation of concerns and enhances security by ensuring that collection creation is an explicit action, particularly valuable in production environments.
However, while this solution offers significant benefits in terms of security and operational clarity, it may not align well with the requirements of all application contexts, especially those that are dynamic and user-driven, such as in IoT applications that I am currently developing. In these environments, the ability to create collections dynamically in response to user interactions is crucial for flexibility and scalability.
The main challenge with the proposed permission separation approach in such dynamic environments includes:
- Loss of Granularity: The need to manage multiple users or roles (one for insertion and another for collection creation) introduces complexity, especially when the application logic requires the dynamic creation of collections. This granularity is essential for IoT backends, where users might need to create their own “buckets” of information on-the-fly.
- Operational Complexity: Implementing separate permissions complicates the application’s backend logic, requiring additional logic to handle permission errors and switch between users or roles depending on the operation. This increases the risk of bugs and makes the system harder to maintain.
- Reduced Flexibility: For applications that thrive on being able to dynamically adjust to user needs by creating new collections with specific configurations (e.g., timeseries collections with particular indexes), the need to predefine and explicitly create these collections before insertion can hinder responsiveness and agility.
- Increased Development Overhead : The requirement to detect insertion failures due to permission errors, followed by initiating collection creation with a different user, introduces significant complexity into the development process. This approach necessitates establishing a new communication session with the database, handling authentication for a different user or role, and managing the context switch between different operations. Such steps not only complicate the codebase but also impact the developer experience negatively. This added complexity can lead to a more cumbersome development process, detracting from the efficiency of error handling and recovery mechanisms, and resulting in additional overhead for maintaining and debugging the application.
Given these considerations, while I appreciate the security and clarity benefits of the suggested approach, I propose maintaining the flexibility to control collection creation through the insertion process itself. Introducing an optional parameter (e.g., require_existing_collection) could provide a more nuanced control, allowing developers to specify when collections should be created dynamically and when they should exist beforehand. This would offer a balanced solution that accommodates both the need for explicit collection management in production and the flexibility required in dynamic, user-centric applications.
I believe a solution that offers flexibility while still enabling strict control when needed could be more beneficial across a wider range of MongoDB use cases.
The issue of automatic creation of databases and collections in MongoDB is a recurring concern within the community, as evidenced by numerous discussions and questions across various forums: