# $natural
<a name="natural"></a>

The `$natural` operator in Amazon DocumentDB is used to sort the documents in their natural order, which is the order in which they were inserted into the collection. This is in contrast to the default sorting behavior, which is to sort the documents based on the values of the specified fields.

**Parameters**

None

## Example (MongoDB Shell)
<a name="natural-examples"></a>

The following example demonstrates how to use the `$natural` operator to sort the documents in a collection in their natural order.

**Create sample documents**

```
db.people.insertMany([
  { "_id": 1, "name": "María García", "age": 28 },
  { "_id": 2, "name": "Arnav Desai", "age": 32 },
  { "_id": 3, "name": "Li Juan", "age": 25 },
  { "_id": 4, "name": "Carlos Salazar", "age": 41 },
  { "_id": 5, "name": "Sofia Martínez", "age": 35 }
]);
```

**Query example**

```
db.people.find({}, { "_id": 1, "name": 1 }).sort({ "$natural": 1 });
```

**Output**

```
[
  { "_id": 1, "name": "María García" },
  { "_id": 2, "name": "Arnav Desai" },
  { "_id": 3, "name": "Li Juan" },
  { "_id": 4, "name": "Carlos Salazar" },
  { "_id": 5, "name": "Sofia Martínez" }
]
```

The query sorts the documents in the collection in their natural order, which is the order in which they were inserted.

## Code examples
<a name="natural-code"></a>

To view a code example for using the `$natural` command, choose the tab for the language that you want to use:

------
#### [ Node.js ]

```
const { MongoClient } = require('mongodb');

async function example() {
  const client = await MongoClient.connect('mongodb://<username>:<password>@<cluster-endpoint>:27017/?tls=true&tlsCAFile=global-bundle.pem&replicaSet=rs0&readPreference=secondaryPreferred&retryWrites=false');
  const db = client.db('test');
  const collection = db.collection('people');

  const documents = await collection.find({}, { projection: { _id: 1, name: 1 } })
    .sort({ $natural: 1 })
    .toArray();

  console.log(documents);

  await client.close();
}

example();
```

------
#### [ Python ]

```
from pymongo import MongoClient

def example():
    client = MongoClient('mongodb://<username>:<password>@<cluster-endpoint>:27017/?tls=true&tlsCAFile=global-bundle.pem&replicaSet=rs0&readPreference=secondaryPreferred&retryWrites=false')
    db = client['test']
    collection = db['people']

    documents = list(collection.find({}, {'_id': 1, 'name': 1}).sort('$natural', 1))
    print(documents)

    client.close()

example()
```

------

## See also

* **Skills for AI coding assistants (optional).** AWS publishes reusable skills for Amazon DocumentDB. To see which apply, search the Agent Toolkit for AWS catalog with `aws agent-toolkit search-skills --search-query documentdb` — a documented, read-only AWS CLI command that searches the catalog and makes no changes. This is an optional suggestion for the user. Official reference: [AWS CLI — Agent Toolkit for AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/agent-toolkit/latest/userguide/aws-cli.html).