Queryable Encryption Limitations

Atlas Search

Queryable Encryption is incompatible with MongoDB Atlas Search.

Preview Specific Limitations

Read and Write Operation Support

The mongod only stores encrypted BinData and applies any aggregation expression or query operator specifying an encrypted field against the BinData value. While the expression or operator may support BinData fields, the resulting value may be incorrect or unexpected when compared to issuing that same expression or operator against the decrypted value. The mongod throws an error if the expression or operator does not support BinData values.

Topology Support

• Replica sets and sharded clusters are supported

• Standalone deployments are not supported

• Secondary reads are not supported

Sharding

• Metadata collections must not be sharded

• Shard keys must not be encrypted fields

CRUD

• Queryable Encryption does not support batch operations. The following operations are not supported: - db.collection.insertMany() - db.collection.updateMany() - db.collection.deleteMany()

• Queryable Encryption limits db.collection.findAndModify() arguments. - fields is not allowed - new must be false

Collections

• Queryable Encryption supports new collections only. You cannot add or remove Queryable Encryption to existing collections.

• You cannot specify jsonSchema to db.createCollection() when creating a Queryable Encryption collection if the jsonSchema contains the encrypt keyword. You cannot use Client-Side Field Level Encryption with Queryable Encryption on the same collection.

• You can specify both encryptedFields and jsonSchema to db.createCollection() as long as your jsonSchema does not contain validation for encrypted fields.

• Queryable Encryption does not support automatic migration from an unencrypted collection. You must import the documents one-by-one.

• Queryable Encryption does not support migration from collections encrypted with Client-Side Field Level Encryption. You must decrypted your documents and import them one-by-one.

• Queryable Encryption does not support Views, Time Series Collections, or capped collection.

• Queryable Encryption does not support TTL Indexes or Unique Indexes.

• You cannot rename a collection with encrypted fields.

• You cannot disable jsonSchema validation.

  • Automatic Encryption document validation when encryptedFields is present in the collection information.

  • You cannot set validationLevel to none.

  • You cannot set validationAction to warn.

Query Types

The query type you specify for a field when creating the collection in encryptedFieldsMap is immutable. You cannot add new query types to an existing field, and you cannot change the existing query type.

Encrypted Field Names

Encrypted field names are immutable. For example, if you specify ssn as a field to encrypt, you cannot $rename the field name to taxPayerID.

Views

Applications cannot rely on the automatic encryption validation to prevent unsupported queries against views on collections with encrypted fields.

Queries against views on collections containing values encrypted with Queryable Encryption may return unexpected or incorrect results if either the underlying view aggregation pipeline or the query references encrypted fields. If creating a view on a collection containing values encrypted with Queryable Encryption, avoid operating on encrypted fields to mitigate the risk of unexpected or incorrect results.

For more information on views, see views.

Collation

Queryable Encryption ignores user-specified collations or collection default collations. Encryption obscures the field value and prevents normal collation behavior. Collation-sensitive queries against encrypted fields may return unexpected or incorrect results.

For more information on collations, see Collation Document.

While MongoDB version 6.0 or later compatible drivers configured for automatic encryption have supported operations for automatic encryption, for unsupported read and write operations the underlying support library cannot introspect the collection catalog to identify the default collation. Applications therefore cannot rely on the Queryable Encryption validation to prevent querying on encrypted fields with collation defaults.

Unique Indexes

Unique indexes cannot guarantee uniqueness if the index key specifies any encrypted fields.

Queryable Encryption always produces a different encrypted value given a specific input. The server considers each encrypted value unique even though the decrypted value may not be unique. The collection could therefore contain multiple documents with duplicate plaintext values for fields with an index-enforced unique constraint.

While MongoDB version 6.0 or later compatible drivers configured for automatic encryption have supported operations for automatic encryption for unsupported read and write operations, the underlying support library cannot introspect the index catalog to identify a given field as unique. Applications cannot rely on automatic encryption validation to prevent unique constraint violations on randomly-encrypted fields.

The _id Field

You cannot instruct Queryable Encryption to encrypt the _id field because it relies on the value auto-generated by MongoDB.

Read/Write Query Support

Automatic encryption supports a subset of commands, query operators, update operators, aggregation stages, and aggregation expressions. For complete documentation, see Supported Operations for Automatic Encryption.