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Server Sessions

New in version 3.6.

Overview

MongoDB’s server sessions, or logical sessions, are the underlying framework used by client sessions to support Causal Consistency and retryable writes.

Important

Applications use client sessions to interface with server sessions.

Server sessions are available for replica sets and sharded clusters only.

Command Options

Starting in 3.6, MongoDB drivers associate all operations with a server session, with the exception of unacknowledged writes. The following options are available for all commands to support association with a server session:

Important

The mongo shell and the drivers assign these options to the commands in the session.

Option Type Description
lsid Document The document that specifies the unique id of the session associated with the command. If the txnNumber is specified, the lsid is required.
txnNumber 64-bit integer

A strictly increasing non-negative number that uniquely identifies the command in the command’s session.

If specified, the command must also include the lsid option.

For the delete, insert, and update commands that take an array of statements, the following option is also available:

Important

Do not manually set stmtIds. MongoDB sets the stmtIds to be strictly increasing non-negative numbers.

Option Type Description
stmtIds Array of 32-bit integers Array of numbers that uniquely identify their respective write operations within the write command.

Sessions Commands

The following commands can be used to list, manage, and kill server sessions throughout MongoDB clusters:

Commands Descriptions
endSessions Expires specified server sessions.
killAllSessions Kills all server sessions.
killAllSessionsByPattern Kills all server sessions that match the specified pattern.
killSessions Kills specified server sessions.
refreshSessions Refreshes idle server sessions.
startSession Starts a new server session.

Sessions and Access Control

If the deployment enforces authentication/authorization, the user must be authenticated to start a session, and only that user can use the session.

Changed in version 3.6.3: To use sessions with $external authentication users (i.e. Kerberos, LDAP, x.509 users), the usernames cannot be greater than 10k bytes.

If the deployment does not enforce authentication/authorization, a created session has no owner and can be used by any user on any connection. If a user authenticates and creates a session for a deployment that does not enforce authentication/authorization, that user owns the session. However, any user on any connection may use the session.

If the deployment transitions to authentication without any downtime, any sessions without an owner cannot be used.

See also

maxSessions