mongodb count num of distinct values per field/key

Question

Is there a query for calculating how many distinct values a field contains in DB.

f.e I have a field for country and there are 8 types of country values (spain, engl

Answer 1

Here is example of using aggregation API. To complicate the case we're grouping by case-insensitive words from array property of the document.

db.articles.aggregate([
    {
        $match: {
            keywords: { $not: {$size: 0} }
        }
    },
    { $unwind: "$keywords" },
    {
        $group: {
            _id: {$toLower: '$keywords'},
            count: { $sum: 1 }
        }
    },
    {
        $match: {
            count: { $gte: 2 }
        }
    },
    { $sort : { count : -1} },
    { $limit : 100 }
]);

that give result such as

{ "_id" : "inflammation", "count" : 765 }
{ "_id" : "obesity", "count" : 641 }
{ "_id" : "epidemiology", "count" : 617 }
{ "_id" : "cancer", "count" : 604 }
{ "_id" : "breast cancer", "count" : 596 }
{ "_id" : "apoptosis", "count" : 570 }
{ "_id" : "children", "count" : 487 }
{ "_id" : "depression", "count" : 474 }
{ "_id" : "hiv", "count" : 468 }
{ "_id" : "prognosis", "count" : 428 }