The point of Cosmos DB value uniqueness only per shard key (partition key)

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Microsoft's documentation of Managing indexing in Azure Cosmos DB's API for MongoDB states that:

Azure Cosmos DB's API for MongoDB server version 3.6 automatically indexes the _id field, which can't be dropped. It automatically enforces the uniqueness of the _id field per shard key.

I'm confused about the reasoning behind "per shard key" part. I see it as "you're unique field won't be globally unique at all" because if I understand it correctly, if I have the Guid field _id as unique and userId field as the partition key then I can have 2 elements with the same ID provided that they happen to belong to 2 different users.

Is it that I fail to pick the right partition key? Because in my understanding partition key should be the field that is the most frequently used for filtering the data. But what if I need to select the data from the database only by having the ID field value? Or query the data for all users?

Is it the inherent limits in distributed systems that I need to accept and therefore remodel my process of designing a database and programming the access to it? Which in this case would be: ALWAYS query your data from this collection not only by _id field but first by userId field? And not treat my _id field alone as an identifier but rather see an identifier as a compound of userId and _id?

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mongodbazure-cosmosdbshardinguniqueidentifierazure-cosmosdb-mongoapi
If your code is generating the value of _id, and you're using something like a guid method, this shouldn't be an issue to you. However, if you're leaving it to Cosmos DB to generate _id (in other words, you didn't specify a value), then you will be guaranteed to have uniqueness within a shard (partition), but not necessarily globally. - David Makogon
@DavidMakogon Can you please elaborate? How can server side logic produce "more unique" result than the database itself? - Mariusz Ignatowicz
I'm not saying there's a "more unique" way. I'm saying that, if you generate guids on your own, you know you will have a unique guid regardless of partition key. Likely the same outcome if you leave it to Cosmos DB to generate. Note: if you generate on your own, you will have the ability to use the same _id value in different partitions (shards). The enforcement is at the partition boundary. - David Makogon

1 Answers

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TL;DR

Is it the inherent limits in distributed systems that I need to accept and therefore remodel my process of designing a database and programming the access to it? Which in this case would be: ALWAYS query your data from this collection not only by _id field but first by userId field? And not treat my _id field alone as an identifier but rather see an identifier as a compound of userId and _id?

Yes. Mostly.

Longer version

While this id not field not being unique is not intuitive at first sight, it actually makes sense, considering CosmosDB seeks unlimited scale for pinpoint GET/PUT operations. This requires the partitions to act independently and this is where a lot of the magic comes from. If id or other unique constraint uniqueness would have been enforced globally, then every document change would have to coordinate with all other partitions and that would no longer be optimal or predictable in endless scale.

I also think this design decision of separation of data is in alignment with the schemaless distributed mindset of CosmosDB. If you use CosmosDB then embrace this and avoid trying to force cross-document relation constraints to it. Manage them in data/api design and client logic layer instead. For example, by using a guid for id.

About partition key..

Is it that I fail to pick the right partition key? [...] partition key should be the field that is the most frequently used for filtering the data.

It depends;). You have to think also for worst query performance, not only the "most frequently" used ones. Make sure MOST queries can go directly to correct partition, meaning you MUST know the exact target partition key before making those queries, even for those "get by id"-queries. Measure the cost for left cross-partition queries on realistic data set.

It is difficult to say whether userId is a good key or not. It most likely is known in advance and could be included to get-by-id queries, so it's good in that sense. But you should also consider:

  • hot partition - all single user queries would go to single partition, no scale out there.
  • partition size - single user data most likely grows-and-grows-and-grows. Partitions have a max size limits and working within those target partitions will become costlier over time.

So, if possible, I would define smaller partitions to distribute the load further. Maybe consider using a composite partition key or similar tactics to split user partition to multiple smaller ones. Or to the very extreme of having id itself a partition key, which is good for writes and get-by-id but less optimal for everything else.

.. just always make sure to have the chosen partition key at hand.