drop¶

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Behavior

drop¶

The drop command removes an entire collection from a database. The command has following syntax:

{ drop: <collection_name>, writeConcern: <document>, comment: <any> }

The command takes the following fields:

Field Description

drop The name of the collection to drop.

writeConcern

Optional. A document expressing the write concern of the drop command. Omit to use the default write concern.

When issued on a sharded cluster, mongos converts the write concern of the drop command and its helper db.collection.drop() to "majority".

comment

Optional. A user-provided comment to attach to this command. Once set, this comment appears alongside records of this command in the following locations:

mongod log messages, in the attr.command.cursor.comment field.
Database profiler output, in the command.comment field.
currentOp output, in the command.comment field.

A comment can be any valid BSON type (string, integer, object, array, etc).

New in version 4.4.

The mongo shell provides the equivalent helper method db.collection.drop().

Behavior¶

This command also removes any indexes associated with the dropped collection.
Starting in MongoDB 4.4, the db.collection.drop() method and drop command abort any in-progress index builds on the target collection before dropping the collection. Prior to MongoDB 4.4, attempting to drop a collection with in-progress index builds results in an error, and the collection is not dropped.

For replica sets or shard replica sets, aborting an index on the primary does not simultaneously abort secondary index builds. MongoDB attempts to abort the in-progress builds for the specified indexes on the primary and if successful creates an associated abort oplog entry. Secondary members with replicated in-progress builds wait for a commit or abort oplog entry from the primary before either committing or aborting the index build.
The drop command and its helper db.collection.drop() create an invalidate Event for any Change Streams opened on the dropped collection.
Starting in MongoDB 4.0.2, dropping a collection deletes its associated zone/tag ranges.

Resource Locking¶

Changed in version 4.2.

drop obtains an exclusive lock on the specified collection for the duration of the operation. All subsequent operations on the collection must wait until drop releases the lock.

Prior to MongoDB 4.2, drop obtained an exclusive lock on the parent database, blocking all operations on the database and all its collections until the operation completed.

← currentOp dropDatabase →