I am in the process of changing the schema for one of my MongoDB collections. (I had been storing dates as strings, and now my application stores them as ISODate
s; I need to go back and change all of the old records to use ISODate
s as well.) I think I know how to do this using an update, but since this operation will affect tens of thousands of records I'm hesitant to issue an operation that I'm not 100% sure will work. Is there any way to do a "dry run" of an update that will show me, for a small number of records, the original record and how it would be changed?
Edit: I ended up using the approach of adding a new field to each record, and then (after verifying that the data was right) renaming that field to match the original. It looked like this:
db.events.find({timestamp: {$type: 2}})
.forEach( function (e) {
e.newTimestamp = new ISODate(e.timestamp);
db.events.save(e);
} )
db.events.update({},
{$rename: {'newTimestamp': 'timestamp'}},
{multi: true})
By the way, that method for converting the string times to ISODate
s was what ended up working. (I got the idea from this SO answer.)