Are Cosmos DB indexes range by default?

Question

I have a cosmos db that's around 4gb which when it was small could perform date filters relatively quickly with a low RU value (3 - 15ish) but as the DB has grown to contain millions of records it now has slowed right down and the RU value is up in the thousands.

Looking at the documentation for date https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/working-with-dates is says

To execute these queries efficiently, you must configure your collection for Range indexing on strings

However reading the linked index policy doc (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/index-policy) it sounds like by default every field has a range index created

The default indexing policy for newly created containers indexes every property of every item, enforcing range indexes for any string or number, and spatial indexes for any GeoJSON object of type Point

Do I need to configure the indexs to anything other than the default?

{
"indexingMode": "consistent",
"automatic": true,
"includedPaths": [
    {
        "path": "/*"
    }
],
"excludedPaths": [
    {
        "path": "/\"_etag\"/?"
    }
]

}

Sajeetharan Sajeetharan · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-03T05:06:48

When it comes to indexing you can see the best practices from here,

You should exclude unused paths from indexing for faster writes. You should leverage IndexingPolicy with IncludedPaths and ExcludedPaths

for ex:

var collection = new DocumentCollection { id = "excludedPathCollection"};
collection.IndexingPolicy.IncludedPaths.Add(new IncludedPath { Path = "/*" });
collection.IndexingPolicy.ExcludedPaths.Add(new ExcludedPath { Path = "/nonIndexedContent/*");

Are Cosmos DB indexes range by default?

2 Answers