Question

I’m just getting started with MongoDb and I’ve noticed that I get a lot of duplicate records for entries that I meant to be unique. I would like to know how to use a composite key for my data and I’m looking for information on how to create them. Lastly, I am using Java to access mongo and morphia as my ORM layer so including those in your answers would be awesome.

Morphia: http://code.google.com/p/morphia/

Answer 1

You can use objects for the _id field as well. The _id field is always unique. That way you kind of get a composite primary key:

 { _id : { a : 1, b: 1} }

Just be careful when creating these ids that the order of keys (a and b in the example) matters, if you swap them around, it is considered a different object.

The other possibility is to leave _id alone and create a unique compound index.

db.things.ensureIndex({firstname: 1, lastname: 1}, {unique: true});
//Deprecated since version 3.0.0, is now an alias for db.things.createIndex()

https://docs.mongodb.org/v3.0/reference/method/db.collection.ensureIndex/