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How can I query a collection and limit the returned results. Suppose I have a DB of 500M documents but I only want to search and return the first 10 matches without having to search the whole collection(for performance reasons).

Ideally I could return the nth through mth results in O(m-n) time.

Any ideas if this is possible or how to do it?

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You can do that by applying skip and limit:

db.collection.find(<query>).limit(<number>).skip(<number>)

You can read more about performance issues on Limit the Number of Query Results to Reduce Network Demand

Edit:

limit and skip can be interchanged, skip is always called first.

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See the MongoDB Realm documentation for more details on this: docs.mongodb.com/realm/mongodb/actions/collection.find
See this medium article for some advice on doing paginated queries with MongoDB: medium.com/swlh/mongodb-pagination-fast-consistent-ece2a97070f3
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db.collection.find({desired_conditions}).limit(postive_int)

here you just need to replace positive_int with number of results you want returned

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this is the same as the accepted answer, which is unnecessary

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