How can I query a collection and limit the returned results. Suppose I have a DB of 500M documents but I only want to search and return the first 10 matches without having to search the whole collection(for performance reasons).
Ideally I could return the nth through mth results in O(m-n) time.
Any ideas if this is possible or how to do it?
You can do that by applying skip and limit:
db.collection.find(<query>).limit(<number>).skip(<number>)
You can read more about performance issues on Limit the Number of Query Results to Reduce Network Demand
Edit:
limit and skip can be interchanged, skip is always called first.