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Fundamentals

Encrypted Collection Management

On this page

  • Overview
  • Metadata Collections
  • Storage Costs
  • Write Costs
  • Insert Operations
  • Update Operations
  • Delete Operations
  • Index Compaction

In this guide, you can learn how to manage your encrypted collections, and the storage and write costs of Queryable Encryption.

Overview

Queryable Encryption introduces the ability to encrypt sensitive fields in your documents using randomized encryption, while still being able to query the encrypted fields.

With Queryable Encryption, a given plaintext value always encrypts to a different ciphertext, while still remaining queryable. To enable this functionality, Queryable Encryption uses four data structures:

  • Three metadata collections

  • A field in every document in the encrypted collection called __safeContent__

Important

It is critical that these data structures are not modified or deleted, or query results will be incorrect.

Metadata Collections

When you create an encrypted collection using Queryable Encryption, MongoDB creates three metadata collections:

  • enxcol_.<collectionName>.esc, referred to as ESC

  • enxcol_.<collectionName>.ecc, referred to as ECC

  • enxcol_.<collectionName>.ecoc, referred to as ECOC

Example

If you create a collection called "patients", MongoDB creates the following metadata collections:

  • enxcol_.patients.esc

  • enxcol_.patients.ecc

  • enxcol_.patients.ecoc

When you insert documents with encrypted fields that you wish to query on, MongoDB updates the metadata collections to maintain an index that enables you to query. MongoDB refers to this as "indexed field". This comes at a cost in storage and write speed.

Storage Costs

Storage and write costs increase based on the number of indexed fields per document.

Important

Technical Preview

MongoDB's guidance during the technical preview is to expect two to three times the storage requirement for a Queryable Encryption collection and associated metadata collections. For example, a 1 GB collection may have a storage requirement of 2-3 GB for associated metadata collections.

This guidance will be tuned in a future release.

Write Costs

Insert Operations

When inserting a document, each indexed field requires two writes to metadata collections.

  • One write to ESC

  • One write to ECOC

Example

Inserting a document with two indexed fields requires:

  • One write to the encrypted collection.

  • Four writes to the metadata collections.

Update Operations

When updating a document, each indexed field requires four writes to metadata collections.

  • One write to ESC

  • One write to ECC

  • Two writes to ECOC

Example

Updating a document with two indexed fields requires:

  • One write to the encrypted collection.

  • Eight writes to the metadata collections.

Delete Operations

When deleting a document, each indexed field requires two writes to the metadata collections.

  • One write to ECC

  • One write to ECOC

Example

Deleting a document with two indexed fields requires:

  • One write into the encrypted collection.

  • Four writes to the metadata collections.

Index Compaction

Important

Technical Preview

You are required to run index compaction during the technical preview. MongoDB plans to automatically run index compaction in a future release.

As you insert, update, and delete documents, the metadata collections change and grow. Index compaction is a process that prunes the metadata collections and reduces their size.

You should run index compaction when the size of ECOC exceeds 1 GB.

You can check the size of your collections using mongosh and issuing the db.collection.totalSize() command.

Example

In this example, the encrypted collection is named "patients".

db.enxcol_.patients.ecoc.totalSize()
1407960328

Important

You must configure your client for Queryable Encryption to run index compaction.

To run index compaction, use mongosh and run the db.collection.compactStructuredEncryptionData() command to reduce the size of the metadata collections.

Example

const eDB = "encryption"
const eKV = "__keyVault"
const secretDB = "records"
const secretCollection = "patients"
const localKey = fs.readFileSync("master-key.txt")
const localKeyProvider = { key: localKey }
const queryableEncryptionOpts = {
  kmsProviders: { local: localKeyProvider },
  keyVaultNamespace: `${eDB}.${eKV}`,
}
const encryptedClient = Mongo("localhost:27017", queryableEncryptionOpts)
const encryptedDB = encryptedClient.getDB(secretDB)
const encryptedCollection = encryptedDB.getCollection(secretCollection)
encryptedCollection.compactStructuredEncryptionData()
{
  "stats": {
     ...
  },
  "ok": 1,
  ...
}
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Explicit Encryption →

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