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MongoDB Collection Basics Tutorial

In this tutorial we learn the basics of collections, like what they are, how to create and delete collections and how to check if a specific collection exists.

What is a Collection
How to create a Collection
How to check if a Collection exists
How to delete (drop) a Collection

What is a Collection

A collection is simply a group of documents in MongoDB.

If you have experience with RDB’s you can think of a collection as a table.

Collections do not enforce a particular schema and, typically, all documents in a collection have a similar or related purpose.

For example, if we use our normalized data model example from the Data Modelling lesson , all documents about an employee would go into an ‘employee’ collection.

Employee Collection:

[Doc] Personal details: First and last name, and date of birth
[Doc] Contact information: Mobile number and email address
[Doc] Adress: Area, City, State/Province

How to create a Collection

To create a collection, we use the db.createCollection() method.

This function accepts 2 arguments.

The first argument is the name of the collection we want to create
The second argument allows us to specify any options about memory size and indexing

Syntax:

db.createCollection(name, Options)

The Options argument is a document and is completely optional. If we want to use the default options, we can simply omit the second argument.

We’ll use a database called ‘mydb’ and create a collection called ‘employee’.

Remember that strings, like names, must be wrapped in quotes.

Example:

use mydb

db.createCollection("employee")

If the collection was created, the terminal will return an OK status.

Output:

{ "ok" : 1 }

If we want to specify the options while creating a collection, we can use any of the following.

Field	Type	Description
capped	Boolean	If true, it enables a capped collection with the specified size parameter.
		A capped collection fixes its size and automatically overwrites the oldest enteries when it reaches maximum size.
autoIndexID	Boolean	Deprecated since version 3.2.
		If true, it will automatically create an index on any _id fields in the documents. The default value is false.
size	Number	Specifies a maximum size in bytes for a capped collection. If the capped field is true, you will need to specify this field as well.
max	Number	Specifies the maximum number of documents allowed inside a capped collection.
storageEngine	Document	Available for the WiredTiger storage engine only.
		Specifies the storage engine on a per-collection basis.
validator	Document	Specifies the schema validation rules or expressions for a collection.
validationLevel	String	Specifies how strictly MongoDB will apply the validator rules during an update operation.
		The available options are:
		“off” for no validation
		“strict” for validation on all insert and update operations (default)
		“moderate” for validation on all insert and update operations only against existing valid documents
validationAction	String	Specifies whether to error on invalid documents, or just warn about violations but allow invalid documents to be inserted.
		The available options are:
		“error” to specify a document must pass validation before a write operation occurs, otherwise the operation will fail
		“warn” to specify that a warning will be logged to operation logs if the validation fails
indexOptionDefaults	Document	Specifies a default configuration for indices. This option accepts a storageEngine document.
viewOn	String	Specifies the name of the source collection or view from which to create the view.
		The name is not the full namespace of the collection or view and must be created in the same database as the source collection.
pipeline	Array	Specifies an array that consists of the aggregation pipeline stage(s) .
collation	Document	Specifies the default collation (language-specific rules for string comparison).
		The available options are:
		“locale” (required)
		“caseLevel”
		“caseFirst”
		“strength”
		“numericOrdering”
		“alternate”
		“maxVariable”
		“backwards”
		For a collection, you can only specify the collation during the collection creation. Once set, you cannot modify the collection’s default collation.
writeConcern	Document	Specifies the document that expresses the write concern (level of acknowledgement requested from MongoDB for write operations) for the operation.

Most methods in MongoDB have plenty of options like those above. We won’t necessarily always use all of them so we are not going to include a table of options each time in this course.

If you want to see all of a method’s options, please see the official MongoDB documentation for that specific method.

Let’s look at the simplified syntax and a small example.

Syntax:

db.createCollection("name",
{
    "capped" : true,
    "size"   : num_in_bytes,
    "max"    : num_docs
})

Example:

db.createCollection("myCol",
{
    "capped" : true,
    "size"   : 5000000,
    "max"    : 10000
})

In the example above, we create a new Collection called ‘myCol’ with the following options:

capped:true will limit the size of the collection to the size we specify in the third key
size:5000000 will set the maximum size of our collection to 5 million bytes, or 5 Mb
max:10000 will allow us to store 10 thousand documents in this collection

If the operation succeeds, the terminal will return an OK status.

Output:

{ "ok" : 1 }

MongoDB will also create a collection automatically when we try to insert a value into a document.

We cover document creation and value insertion in more detail in the Document CRUD: Create lesson .

Example:

db.tutorial.insert({"name":"MongoDB Tutorial"})

The example above will create the ‘tutorial’ collection.

How to check if a Collection exists

If we want to check if a collection exists, we can use the show collections command.

Example:

show collections

This command will list all the collections in a selected database.

Output:

employee
myCol
tutorial

How to delete (drop) a Collection

If we want to delete (drop) a collection, we use the db.collection.drop() method.

Syntax:

db.collection_name.drop()

Example:

db.myCol.drop()

If the operation succeeds, the terminal will return a boolean true status.

Output:

true

We can confirm that the collection was deleted by running the show collections command.

Output:

employee
tutorial

Great, the ‘myCol’ collection was dropped from the database.

Databases

Document CRUD: Create