FAQ: What is a Collection

When storing an entity from the client:

• The document collection metadata is generated based on the stored entity object type.

• By default, the client pluralizes the collection name based on the type name.
  e.g. storing an entity of type Order will generate the collection name Orders.

• The function that is responsible for tagging the documents can be overridden.
  See: Global Identifier Generation Conventions.

When creating a new document through the Studio:

• The collection metadata is generated based on the document ID prefix.
  e.g Documents that are created with the following IDs: users|23 / users/45 / users/17
  will all belong to the same Users collection.

• For more information see Documents and Collections
  

• A Collection Query

  • RavenDB keeps an internal storage index per collection created.
    This internal index is used to query the database and retrieve only documents from a specified collection.

• In Indexing

  • Each Map Index is built against a single collection (or muliple collections when using a Multi-Map Index.
    During the indexing process, the index function iterates only over the documents that belong to the specified collection(s).

• In Revisions

  • Documents Revisions can be defined per collection.

• In Ongoing Tasks

  • A RavenDB ETL Task & SQL ETL Task are defined on specified collections.

• The @hilo Collection

  • The ranges of available IDs values returned by HiLo algorithm are per collection name.
    Learn more in: The @hilo Collection

• The @empty Collection

  • Learn more in: The @empty Collection