What's the difference between findAndModify and update in MongoDB?

Question

I\'m a little bit confused by the findAndModify method in MongoDB. What\'s the advantage of it over the update method? For me, it seems that it jus

Answer 1

findAndModify returns the document, update does not.

If I understood Dwight Merriman (one of the original authors of mongoDB) correctly, using update to modify a single document i.e.("multi":false} is also atomic. Currently, it should also be faster than doing the equivalent update using findAndModify.