Add options to your AQL requests

ArangoDB allow you to specify some options when calling your AQL requests. We already use the query & bindvars automatically but here a list of available options

  • count: indicates whether the number of documents in the result set should be returned in the “count” attribute of the result. Calculating the “count” attribute might have a performance impact for some queries in the future so this option is turned off by default, and “count” is only returned when requested.
  • batchSize: maximum number of result documents to be transferred from the server to the client in one roundtrip. If this attribute is not set, a server-controlled default value will be used. A batchSize value of 0 is disallowed.
  • ttl: The time-to-live for the cursor (in seconds). The cursor will be removed on the server automatically after the specified amount of time. This is useful to ensure garbage collection of cursors that are not fully fetched by clients. If not set, a server-defined value will be used (default: 30 seconds).
  • cache: flag to determine whether the AQL query results cache shall be used. If set to false, then any query cache lookup will be skipped for the query. If set to true, it will lead to the query cache being checked for the query if the query cache mode is either on or demand.
  • memoryLimit: the maximum number of memory (measured in bytes) that the query is allowed to use. If set, then the query will fail with error “resource limit exceeded” in case it allocates too much memory. A value of 0 indicates that there is no memory limit.
  • options: key/value object with extra options for the query.
    • fullCount: if set to true and the query contains a LIMIT clause, then the result will have an extra attribute with the sub-attributes stats and fullCount, { ... , "extra": { "stats": { "fullCount": 123 } } }. The fullCount attribute will contain the number of documents in the result before the last top-level LIMIT in the query was applied. It can be used to count the number of documents that match certain filter criteria, but only return a subset of them, in one go. It is thus similar to MySQL’s SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS hint. Note that setting the option will disable a few LIMIT optimizations and may lead to more documents being processed, and thus make queries run longer. Note that the fullCount attribute may only be present in the result if the query has a top-level LIMIT clause and the LIMIT clause is actually used in the query.
    • maxPlans: Limits the maximum number of plans that are created by the AQL query optimizer.
    • maxWarningCount: Limits the maximum number of warnings a query will return. The number of warnings a query will return is limited to 10 by default, but that number can be increased or decreased by setting this attribute.
    • failOnWarning: When set to true, the query will throw an exception and abort instead of producing a warning. This option should be used during development to catch potential issues early. When the attribute is set to false, warnings will not be propagated to exceptions and will be returned with the query result. There is also a server configuration option --query.fail-on-warning for setting the default value for failOnWarning so it does not need to be set on a per-query level.
    • stream: Specify true and the query will be executed in a streaming fashion. The query result is not stored on the server, but calculated on the fly. Beware: long-running queries will need to hold the collection locks for as long as the query cursor exists. When set to false a query will be executed right away in its entirety. In that case query results are either returned right away (if the result set is small enough), or stored on the arangod instance and accessible via the cursor API (with respect to the ttl). It is advisable to only use this option on short-running queries or without exclusive locks (write-locks on MMFiles). Please note that the query options cache, count and fullCount will not work on streaming queries. Additionally query statistics, warnings and profiling data will only be available after the query is finished. The default value is false
    • optimizer: Options related to the query optimizer.
    • rules: A list of to-be-included or to-be-excluded optimizer rules can be put into this attribute, telling the optimizer to include or exclude specific rules. To disable a rule, prefix its name with a -, to enable a rule, prefix it with a +. There is also a pseudo-rule all, which matches all optimizer rules. -all disables all rules.
    • profile: If set to true or 1, then the additional query profiling information will be returned in the sub-attribute profile of the extra return attribute, if the query result is not served from the query cache. Set to 2 the query will include execution stats per query plan node in sub-attribute stats.nodes of the extra return attribute. Additionally the query plan is returned in the sub-attribute extra.plan.
    • satelliteSyncWait: This Enterprise Edition parameter allows to configure how long a DBServer will have time to bring the satellite collections involved in the query into sync. The default value is 60.0 (seconds). When the max time has been reached the query will be stopped.
    • maxRuntime: The query has to be executed within the given runtime or it will be killed. The value is specified in seconds. The default value is 0.0 (no timeout).
    • maxTransactionSize: Transaction size limit in bytes. Honored by the RocksDB storage engine only.
    • intermediateCommitSize: Maximum total size of operations after which an intermediate commit is performed automatically. Honored by the RocksDB storage engine only.
    • intermediateCommitCount: Maximum number of operations after which an intermediate commit is performed automatically. Honored by the RocksDB storage engine only.
    • skipInaccessibleCollections: AQL queries (especially graph traversals) will treat collection to which a user has no access rights as if these collections were empty. Instead of returning a forbidden access error, your queries will execute normally. This is intended to help with certain use-cases: A graph contains several collections and different users execute AQL queries on that graph. You can now naturally limit the accessible results by changing the access rights of users on collections. This feature is only available in the Enterprise Edition.

The official documentation is located here https://www.arangodb.com/docs/stable/http/aql-query-cursor-accessing-cursors.html


In this sample we can see that we are calculating the total count in the request, but now we can use the new option to return this value automatically.

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