Text Index Restrictions

One Text Index per Collection

A collection can have at most one text index.

Atlas Search (available in MongoDB Atlas) supports multiple full-text search indexes on a single collection. To learn more, see the Atlas Search documentation.

Text Search and Hints

If a query includes a $text expression, you cannot use hint() to specify which index to use for the query.

Text Search and Phrases

If the $search string of a $text operation includes a phrase and individual terms, text search only matches the documents that include the phrase.

You cannot use the $text operator to search for multiple phrases.

Text Index and Sort

Text indexes cannot improve performance for sort operations. This restriction applies to both single-field and compound text indexes.

Compound Text Index

A compound index can include a text index key in combination with ascending and descending index keys. However, compound text indexes have these restrictions:

• A compound text index cannot include any other special index types, such as multikey or geospatial index fields.

• If the compound text index includes keys preceding the text index key, to perform a $text search, the query predicate must include equality match conditions on the preceding keys.

• When you create a compound text index, all text index keys must be listed adjacently in the index specification document.

For examples of compound text indexes, see these pages:

• Create a Compound Text Index

• Limit Number of Text Index Entries Scanned

Collation Option

Text indexes only support binary comparison, and do not support the collation option. Binary comparison compares the numeric Unicode value of each character in each string, and does not account for letter case or accent marks.

To create a text index on a collection that has a non-simple collation, you must explicitly specify { collation: { locale: "simple" } } when you create the index.

For example, consider a collection named collationTest with a collation of { locale: "en" }:

db.createCollection(
   "collationTest",
   {
      collation: { locale: "en" }
   }
)

To create a text index on the collationTest collection, you must specify { collation: { locale: "simple" } }. The following command creates a text index on the quotes field:

db.collationTest.createIndex(
   {
      quotes: "text"
   },
   {
      collation: { locale: "simple" }
   }
)