Question

In some situations I need to completely overwrite a specific MongoDB collection by doing:

1. db.collection.remove()
2. db.collection.insert(doc) multiple times.

What if 1. succeeds but somewhere 2. fails?
Is there a way to do a rollback when this fails?
Any other way to go about this?

Answer 1

If your collection isn’t sharded you could:

1. Rename the original collection.
2. Create a new collection using the original name.
3. Populate the new collection.
4. If all went well, drop the original collection, otherwise drop the new collection and rename the original one back to the original name.