Today I had an error because I was trying to set some data on a nested object in MongoDB, except that the parent key was null in one case. So I got an error because Mongo didn't know how to set null to an object. It seemed quite unusual that the value for that particular key would be null.
So I wanted to figure out how many documents we had in the database which had the null value for this particular key. So I did a query like this
{thisParticularKey: null}And that returned loads of results. So I thought "Wow! Must be quite common to have a null value for that particular key!".
It was pretty weird though, so I looked a bit more closely and realised that this query also returned all documents on which thisParticularKey doesn't even exist.
The correct way to do this would have been to do a type check instead. Each data type in Mongo has a number and null has the number 10. So once I checked for this, I only got 5 documents back, which seemed much more realistic.
{thisParticularKey: { $type: 10 }}