Case insensitive sorting in MongoDB

Sorting does work like that in MongoDB but you can do this on the fly with aggregate:

Take the following data:

{ "field" : "BBB" }
{ "field" : "aaa" }
{ "field" : "AAA" }

So with the following statement:

db.collection.aggregate([
    { "$project": {
       "field": 1,
       "insensitive": { "$toLower": "$field" }
    }},
    { "$sort": { "insensitive": 1 } }
])

Would produce results like:

{
    "field" : "aaa",
    "insensitive" : "aaa"
},
{
    "field" : "AAA",
    "insensitive" : "aaa"
},
{
    "field" : "BBB",
    "insensitive" : "bbb"
}

The actual order of insertion would be maintained for any values resulting in the same key when converted.

Update: As of now mongodb have case insensitive indexes:

Users.find({})
  .collation({locale: "en" })
  .sort({name: 1})
  .exec()
  .then(...)

shell:

db.getCollection('users')
  .find({})
  .collation({'locale':'en'})
  .sort({'firstName':1})

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Update: This answer is out of date, 3.4 will have case insensitive indexes. Look to the JIRA for more information https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-90

---

Unfortunately MongoDB does not yet have case insensitive indexes: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-90 and the task has been pushed back.

This means the only way to sort case insensitive currently is to actually create a specific "lower cased" field, copying the value (lower cased of course) of the sort field in question and sorting on that instead.