Disclosed herein are exemplary systems and methods for garbage collection and/or deletion in a document database. The methods may include, for each change in a first change set, determining whether a first characteristic of the change is superseded by a second characteristic of a corresponding change in a second change set. The change of the first change set and the change of the second change set can pertain to a document attribute. The method may include determining whether the first change set is redundant with the second change set if each change of the first change set is superseded by a corresponding change of the second change set, and eliminating the first change set from the document database when the first change set is redundant with second change set.