Starting from 6.0 there is no need anymore to call the enableSharding command on a database before to shard a collection.

In 6.0 we made the partitioned flag in config.databases to be false by default for all newly created database and if this field is not found while parsing from disk it will be considered false.

In version 7.1 we can completely remove this field from the IDL and stop persisting it.

So recapping:

• binaries ≤ 5.0 ⇒ the field is always persisted either false/true and if not present will be considered false
• 6.0 ≤ binaries ≤ 7.0 ⇒ the field is always persisted as false and if not present will be considered false
• binaries >= 7.0 ⇒ the field is neither persisted nor parsed