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Map-Reduce

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  • Map-Reduce JavaScript Functions
  • Map-Reduce Results
  • Sharded Collections
  • Views

Note

Aggregation Pipeline as Alternative

Starting in MongoDB 5.0, map-reduce is deprecated:

For examples of aggregation pipeline alternatives to map-reduce, see:

Map-reduce is a data processing paradigm for condensing large volumes of data into useful aggregated results. To perform map-reduce operations, MongoDB provides the mapReduce database command.

Consider the following map-reduce operation:

Diagram of the annotated map-reduce operation.

In this map-reduce operation, MongoDB applies the map phase to each input document (i.e. the documents in the collection that match the query condition). The map function emits key-value pairs. For those keys that have multiple values, MongoDB applies the reduce phase, which collects and condenses the aggregated data. MongoDB then stores the results in a collection. Optionally, the output of the reduce function may pass through a finalize function to further condense or process the results of the aggregation.

All map-reduce functions in MongoDB are JavaScript and run within the mongod process. Map-reduce operations take the documents of a single collection as the input and can perform any arbitrary sorting and limiting before beginning the map stage. mapReduce can return the results of a map-reduce operation as a document, or may write the results to collections.

Note

Map-reduce is unsupported for MongoDB Atlas free clusters and MongoDB Atlas serverless instances.

In MongoDB, map-reduce operations use custom JavaScript functions to map, or associate, values to a key. If a key has multiple values mapped to it, the operation reduces the values for the key to a single object.

The use of custom JavaScript functions provide flexibility to map-reduce operations. For instance, when processing a document, the map function can create more than one key and value mapping or no mapping. Map-reduce operations can also use a custom JavaScript function to make final modifications to the results at the end of the map and reduce operation, such as perform additional calculations.

In MongoDB, the map-reduce operation can write results to a collection or return the results inline. If you write map-reduce output to a collection, you can perform subsequent map-reduce operations on the same input collection that merge replace, merge, or reduce new results with previous results. See mapReduce and Perform Incremental Map-Reduce for details and examples.

When returning the results of a map-reduce operation inline, the result documents must be within the BSON Document Size limit, which is currently 16 megabytes. For additional information on limits and restrictions on map-reduce operations, see the mapReduce reference page.

MongoDB supports map-reduce operations on sharded collections.

However, starting in version 4.2, MongoDB deprecates the map-reduce option to create a new sharded collection and the use of the sharded option for map-reduce. To output to a sharded collection, create the sharded collection first. MongoDB 4.2 also deprecates the replacement of an existing sharded collection.

See Map-Reduce and Sharded Collections.

Views do not support map-reduce operations.

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