There is no straight way of pulling/removing by array index. In fact, this is an open issue http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1014 , you may vote for it.
The workaround is using $unset and then $pull:
db.lists.update({}, {$unset : {"interests.3" : 1 }})
db.lists.update({}, {$pull : {"interests" : null}})
Update: as mentioned in some of the comments this approach is not atomic and can cause some race conditions if other clients read and/or write between the two operations. If we need the operation to be atomic, we could:
- Read the document from the database
- Update the document and remove the item in the array
- Replace the document in the database. To ensure the document has not changed since we read it, we can use the update if current pattern described in the mongo docs