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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-14T19:34:40+00:00

Current MongoDB documentation states the following: You may only have 1 geospatial index per

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Current MongoDB documentation states the following:

You may only have 1 geospatial index per collection, for now. While
MongoDB may allow to create multiple indexes, this behavior is
unsupported. Because MongoDB can only use one index to support a
single query, in most cases, having multiple geo indexes will produce
undesirable behavior.

However, when I create two geospatial indices in a collection (using Mongoose), they work just fine:

MySchema.index({
  'loc1': '2d',
  extraField1: 1,
  extraField2: 1
});

MySchema.index({
  'loc2': '2d',
  extraField1: 1,
  extraField2: 1
});

My question is this: while it seems to work, the MongoDB documentation says this could “produce undesirable behavior”. So far, nothing undesirable has not yet been discovered neither in testing or use.

Should I be concerned about this? If the answer is yes then what would you recommend as a workaround?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It is still not supported, so even although you can create two of them, it doesn’t mean they are actually used properly. I would investigate explain output, on the mongo shell and issue a few queries that make use of the loc and loc2 fields in a geospatial way. For example with:

    use yourDbName
db.yourCollection.find( { loc: { $nearSphere: [ 0, 0 ] } } ).explain();

    and:

    db.yourCollection.find( { loc2: { $nearSphere: [ 0, 0 ] } } ).explain();

    And then compare what the explain information gives you. You will likely see that only the first created geo index is used for both searches. There are a few tickets in JIRA for this that you might want to vote on:

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