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Geo: legacy `$near` sibling form, 2d quadtree covering, java gauge

19 May 2026 · Joe Drumgoole · Releases

Summary: Geo: legacy $near sibling form, 2d quadtree covering, java gauge (v0.5.1b24).

Three geo improvements that close the long-standing tail of the phase 1/2 geo work and lift the mongo-java-driver gauge into the geo surface for the first time.

Legacy mongod 2d shape — {geo: {$near: [x, y], $maxDistance: r, $minDistance: r2}} with the distance bounds at sibling level rather than nested inside $near — now matches end-to-end through both the operator matcher and the 2d-index picker. This is exactly what mongo-java-driver's Filters.near(field, x, y, max, min) and Filters.nearSphere(...) build. Unit conventions match mongod: legacy $near takes the bound in input units (planar Pythagoras); legacy $nearSphere takes radians on the unit sphere (picker converts to meters for 2dsphere and to degrees for 2d).

The 2d range scan picks tighter Z-order ranges via a quadtree decomposition of the bbox: each 2^k × 2^k power-of-2-aligned quadtree cell that lands fully inside the bbox emits one contiguous Z-range (the invariant that makes Z-order indexes work). Partial-overlap cells recurse; pure-outside cells are skipped. Falls back to the single coarse range if the decomposition would exceed max_ranges=32. Tightens the WT range scan on wider query polygons; correctness is unchanged (per-doc verifier filters false positives either way).

mongo-java-driver's GeoJsonFiltersFunctionalSpecification and GeoFiltersFunctionalSpecification (driver-core functional) joined the java gauge include list and both pass 10/10. They exercise $geoWithin / $geoIntersects / $near / $nearSphere through the driver's Filters builder against a real 2d and 2dsphere index — the kind of integration coverage neither the pymongo conformance gauge nor our in-tree pymongo tests reach.

Full release notes on GitHub · Install from PyPI · Tag