Working with Indexes using HTTP
Read index
returns an index
GET /_api/index/{index-id}
Path Parameters
- index-id (string, required): The index identifier.
The result is an object describing the index. It has at least the following attributes:
-
id: the identifier of the index
-
type: the index type
All other attributes are type-dependent. For example, some indexes provide unique or sparse flags, whereas others don’t. Some indexes also provide a selectivity estimate in the selectivityEstimate attribute of the result.
Responses
HTTP 200: If the index exists, then a HTTP 200 is returned.
HTTP 404: If the index does not exist, then a HTTP 404 is returned.
Examples
shell> curl --header 'accept: application/json' --dump - http://localhost:8529/_api/index/products/0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: application/json
connection: Keep-Alive
content-length: 125
server: ArangoDB
x-arango-queue-time-seconds: 0.000000
x-content-type-options: nosniff
Create index
creates an index
POST /_api/index
Query Parameters
- collection (string, required): The collection name.
Request Body
(json, required)
Creates a new index in the collection collection. Expects an object containing the index details.
The type of the index to be created must specified in the type attribute of the index details. Depending on the index type, additional other attributes may need to specified in the request in order to create the index.
Indexes require the to be indexed attribute(s) in the fields attribute of the index details. Depending on the index type, a single attribute or multiple attributes can be indexed. In the latter case, an array of strings is expected.
Indexing the system attribute _id is not supported for user-defined indexes. Manually creating an index using _id as an index attribute will fail with an error.
Optionally, an index name may be specified as a string in the name attribute. Index names have the same restrictions as collection names. If no value is specified, one will be auto-generated.
Some indexes can be created as unique or non-unique variants. Uniqueness can be controlled for most indexes by specifying the unique flag in the index details. Setting it to true will create a unique index. Setting it to false or omitting the unique attribute will create a non-unique index.
Note: The following index types do not support uniqueness, and using the unique attribute with these types may lead to an error:
- geo indexes
- fulltext indexes (deprecated from ArangoDB 3.10 onwards)
Note: Unique indexes on non-shard keys are not supported in a cluster.
Persistent indexes can optionally be created in a sparse variant. A sparse index will be created if the sparse attribute in the index details is set to true. Sparse indexes do not index documents for which any of the index attributes is either not set or is null.
The optional deduplicate attribute is supported by array indexes of type persistent. It controls whether inserting duplicate index values from the same document into a unique array index will lead to a unique constraint error or not. The default value is true, so only a single instance of each non-unique index value will be inserted into the index per document. Trying to insert a value into the index that already exists in the index will always fail, regardless of the value of this attribute.
The optional attribute estimates is supported by indexes of type persistent. This attribute controls whether index selectivity estimates are maintained for the index. Not maintaining index selectivity estimates can have a slightly positive impact on write performance. The downside of turning off index selectivity estimates will be that the query optimizer will not be able to determine the usefulness of different competing indexes in AQL queries when there are multiple candidate indexes to choose from. The estimates attribute is optional and defaults to true if not set. It will have no effect on indexes other than persistent.
The optional attribute cacheEnabled is supported by indexes of type
persistent. This attribute controls whether an extra in-memory hash cache is
created for the index. The hash cache can be used to speed up index lookups.
The cache can only be used for queries that look up all index attributes via
an equality lookup (==). The hash cache cannot be used for range scans,
partial lookups or sorting.
The cache will be populated lazily upon reading data from the index. Writing data
into the collection or updating existing data will invalidate entries in the
cache. The cache may have a negative effect on performance in case index values
are updated more often than they are read.
The maximum size of cache entries that can be stored is currently 4 MB, i.e.
the cumulated size of all index entries for any index lookup value must be
less than 4 MB. This limitation is there to avoid storing the index entries
of “super nodes” in the cache.
cacheEnabled defaults to false and should only be used for indexes that
are known to benefit from an extra layer of caching.
The optional attribute inBackground can be set to true to create the index in the background, which will not write-lock the underlying collection for as long as if the index is built in the foreground.
Responses
HTTP 200: If the index already exists, then an HTTP 200 is returned.
HTTP 201: If the index does not already exist and could be created, then an HTTP 201 is returned.
HTTP 400: If an invalid index description is posted or attributes are used that the target index will not support, then an HTTP 400 is returned.
HTTP 404: If collection is unknown, then an HTTP 404 is returned.
Delete index
deletes an index
DELETE /_api/index/{index-id}
Path Parameters
- index-id (string, required): The index id.
Deletes an index with index-id.
Responses
HTTP 200: If the index could be deleted, then an HTTP 200 is returned.
HTTP 404: If the index-id is unknown, then an HTTP 404 is returned.
Examples
shell> curl -X DELETE --header 'accept: application/json' --dump - http://localhost:8529/_api/index/products/68350
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: application/json
connection: Keep-Alive
content-length: 48
server: ArangoDB
x-arango-queue-time-seconds: 0.000000
x-content-type-options: nosniff
Read all indexes of a collection
returns all indexes of a collection
GET /_api/index
Query Parameters
- collection (string, required): The collection name.
Returns an object with an attribute indexes containing an array of all index descriptions for the given collection. The same information is also available in the identifiers as an object with the index handles as keys.
Responses
HTTP 200: returns a JSON object containing a list of indexes on that collection.
Examples
Return information about all indexes
shell> curl --header 'accept: application/json' --dump - http://localhost:8529/_api/index?collection=products
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: application/json
connection: Keep-Alive
content-length: 1175
server: ArangoDB
x-arango-queue-time-seconds: 0.000000
x-content-type-options: nosniff