Mongodb / Jongo sorting then limit, vs, limit then sorting

Question

Are these two guaranteed to be the same:

collection.limit(10).sort("{score: -1}")

vs

collection.sort("{score: -1}").limit(10)

The second one does a global sort, and returns the top 10. Is the first one guaranteed to do the same, or may it just return 10 sorted records?

Thanks

Answer 1

In normal queries, sort is processed first, then skip, and then limit, no matter in which order you add them to your cursor object.

The aggregation framework will execute the $sort, $skip and limit operators in their order of appearance in the pipeline.