{"id":102499,"date":"2024-06-24T18:36:13","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T18:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/?p=102499"},"modified":"2024-11-14T22:25:43","modified_gmt":"2024-11-14T22:25:43","slug":"deleting-documents-from-a-mongodb-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/databases\/nosql\/mongodb\/deleting-documents-from-a-mongodb-collection\/","title":{"rendered":"Deleting Documents from a MongoDB Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is part of Robert Sheldon's continuing series on Mongo DB. To see all of the items in the series, click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

So far in this series, we\u2019ve looked at different ways that you can add, retrieve, and update documents in a MongoDB collection. This article continues that discussion by explaining how to use MongoDB Shell to delete documents from a collection. Once you know how to delete documents, you\u2019ll have the foundation you\u2019ll need to perform the basic create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations in MongoDB, assuming you\u2019ve been following along in this series. From this foundation, you can start moving on to more advance CRUD operations.<\/p>\n

As with other aspects of MongoDB, the platform supports multiple ways to delete documents. In this article, I focus on how to use the deleteOne<\/code> and deleteMany<\/code> methods, which are available to the collection object, similar to what you saw with the updateOne<\/code> and updateMany<\/code> methods. As their names suggest, the deleteOne<\/code> method can delete only one document at a time, while the deleteMany<\/code> method can delete any number of documents in a collection.<\/p>\n

The examples in this article are specific to MongoDB Shell, rather than applying to a programming language such as PHP or Python. The syntax tends to vary from one environment to the next, so you have to treat them individually, although the basic concepts are the same.<\/p>\n

The deleteOne<\/code> and deleteMany<\/code> methods are fairly straightforward. Most of the work is in the filter, which is defined as one of the method\u2019s arguments. The filter determines which documents in the collection to delete. As you work through this article, you\u2019ll get a better sense of how the filter works and how to create filters to meet your needs.<\/p>\n

Note: For the examples in this article, I used the same MongoDB Atlas and MongoDB Compass environments I used for the previous articles in this series. Refer to the first article for more specifics about setting up these environments. The examples in this article use the hr<\/code> database and candidates<\/code> collection in that database to demonstrate various way to delete data. As we work through the article, I\u2019ll explain how to set those up and add documents to them.<\/p>\n

Deleting documents in a MongoDB collection<\/h2>\n

The deleteOne<\/code> and deleteMany<\/code> methods are two of the most common techniques used to delete documents from a MongoDB collection. You can use either method in MongoDB Shell by creating a statement that references the collection object and then calls the method. The statement syntax is essentially the same for either method, except for the method name. For example, the following syntax shows the elements that make up a deleteOne<\/code> statement:<\/p>\n

db.collection.deleteOne( { filter }, { options } );<\/pre>\n
As the syntax indicates, the statement consists of the following components:<\/p>\n