MongoDB is becoming even more popular than it is now. More people want to learn about it. So I was preparing a seminar for this company and I had to compile a list of MongoDB limits. I never knew there were so many! Some of them are reasonable, some are weird. Anyway, it’s good to know them. Here’s a list of MongoDB limits as of version 2.4.9:

• Max document size: 16 MB (we all knew this one, right?)
• Max document nesting level: 100 (documents inside documents inside documents…)
• Namespace is limited to ~123 chars (namespace is db_name + collection_name (or index_name))
• DB name is limited to 64 chars
• Default .ns file can store about 24000 namespaces (again, a namespace is referring to a collection or an index)
• If you index some field, that field can’t contain more than 1024 bytes
• Max 64 indexes per collection
• Max 31 fields in a compound index
• fulltext search and geo indexes are mutually exclusive (you can’t use both in the same query)
• If you set a limit of documents in a capped collection, this limit can’t be more than 2**32. Otherwise, number of documents is unlimited.
• On linux, one mongod instance can’t store more than 64 TB of data (128 TB without journal)
• On windows, mongod can’t store more than 4 TB of data (8 TB without journal)
• Max 12 nodes in a replica set
• Max 7 voting nodes in a replica set
• You can’t automatically rollback more than 300 MB of data. If you have more than this, manual invervention is needed.
• group command doesn’t work in sharded cluster.
• db.eval() doesn’t work on sharded collections. Works on unsharded, though.
• $isolated, $snapshot, geoSearch don’t work in a sharded cluster.
• You can’t refer db object in $where functions.
• If you want to shard a collection, it must be smaller than 256 GB, or else it will likely fail to shard.
• Individual (not multi) updates/removes in a sharded cluster must include shard key. Multi versions of these commands may not include shard key.
• Max 512 bytes for shard key values
• You can’t change shard key for a collection once it’s sharded.
• You can’t change value of a shard key of a document.
• aggregate/$sort produces error if sorting takes more than 10 percent of RAM.
• You can’t use $or in 2d geo queries
• You better not use queries with multiple $in parts. If this results in more than 4 million combinations - you get error.
• Database names are case-sensitive (even on case-insensitive file systems)
• Forbidden characters in database names: linux - /. “, windows - /. “*<>:|?
• Forbidden characters in collection names: $ sign, “system.” prefix
• Forbidden characters in field names: .$
• Hashed index can’t be unique
• Max connection number is hardcoded to 20k.

Hope this was useful to you.