MongoDB Deployment Checklist

Version: 1.1.0 | Updated: 2026-07-16

Purpose

Gate promotion and rollback of a MongoDB document model, collection validator, query, aggregation, index, transaction, or shard key.

Why

A syntactically valid MongoDB artifact can still fail because of E11000 unique-index conflict, aggregation memory/spill or blocking stage, transaction/topology incompatibility or transient abort, shard-key routing or hotspot failure, server-selection, TLS, DNS, or pool timeout. Promotion therefore requires target-state and rollback evidence.

How

Run against the exact target and immutable candidate. Preserve outputs from mongosh '<redacted-uri>' --eval 'db.version()'; db.collection.explain('executionStats').find(<representative-filter>).sort(<sort>); db.collection.getIndexes() and db.getCollectionInfos({name:'<collection>'}); db.runCommand({collStats:'<collection>'}); db.adminCommand({replSetGetStatus:1}) where topology and privileges permit. Stop promotion on any failed item.

Version-aware caution

Capture server/FCV, driver, topology, storage engine, Atlas/managed tier, and feature compatibility. Query operators, retryable writes, transactions, sharding, and index features depend on server, FCV, topology, and driver alignment.

Tradeoffs

Promotion waits for "record server, FCV, driver, topology, oplog window, balancer, chunk distribution, and backups" and "introduce validator changes with compatible validation level/action before enforcement". Those MongoDB target checks slow release but directly bound E11000 unique-index conflict and make this rollback executable: Disable writers for the new schema, restore dual-shape readers, and keep additive indexes/fields until old clients are stable; do not mass-update documents back without a resumable, audited migration.

Anti-patterns

• Normalizing every relation into separate collections forces joins or multi-document transactions and discards document-level atomicity.
• Do not remove a native warning, validator, policy, or safety limit merely to make generated output pass.
• Do not claim a successful result without preserving the command, target, artifact/revision, and observed output.

Enterprise considerations

MongoDB governance owns database/collection naming, validator enforcement, encryption and audit settings, shard-key approval, backup evidence, and access to profiler samples containing data.

Official sources

• MongoDB manual
• Data modeling
• Query plans
• Sharding

Checklist

• record server, FCV, driver, topology, oplog window, balancer, chunk distribution, and backups.
• introduce validator changes with compatible validation level/action before enforcement.
• build indexes with capacity and replication-lag monitoring; verify plans before hiding/removing old indexes.
• backfill documents in resumable _id/shard-key ranges with throttling.
• test retryable writes, failover, duplicate-key, transient transaction, and pool behavior.
• monitor examined/returned ratio, spills, queues, replication lag, disk, chunks, and p99.
• rollback preserves readers for both old/new document shapes and index sets.
• shard-key or destructive changes have a vendor-supported migration and restore plan.
• Disable writers for the new schema, restore dual-shape readers, and keep additive indexes/fields until old clients are stable; do not mass-update documents back without a resumable, audited migration.
• Evidence identifies version, target, artifact/revision, command or manual method, UTC time, and result.

Changelog

• 1.1.0 (2026-07-16): Replaced generic gates with native MongoDB evidence and failure controls.
• 1.0.0 (2026-07-16): Added initial checklist.