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He said can it guarantee that the field "length" will always be a number and not..eg a string, or a list, or an object.

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Schemaless by definition means this is not guaranteed. The same property name can hold different types of data from one object to the next. Several other key-value/wide-column have the same exact setup.

Why would it guarantee that ? It's a schema less database. It's not supposed to do that.

And my point is that if you query a single document and the field is a number then it will be returned as a number i.e. it physically stores and understands numbers.

Elasticsearch is schemaless as well, however it can guarantee that a field is a number once used.

Elasticsearch is not schemaless. It typically requires you to define a mapping (schema) upfront. You can set it to automatically infer the mapping based on the available data but this does not make it truly schemaless.

MongoDB allows a free form schema for every document. You're again comparing apples and oranges.

Just to be clear, a better term would be "dynamic schema". You can ask for data type validation since 3.2.

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