Time Series Collections

Overview

In this guide, you can learn about time series collections in MongoDB, and how to interact with them in the MongoDB Java driver.

Time series collections efficiently store sequences of measurements over a period of time. Time series data consists of any data collected over time, metadata that describes the measurement, and the time of the measurement.

Create a Time Series Collection

To create a time series collection, pass the following parameters to the createCollection() method:

• The name of the new collection to create

• The TimeSeriesOptions for creating the collection in a CreateCollectionOptions object

MongoDatabase database = mongoClient.getDatabase("fall_weather");
TimeSeriesOptions tsOptions = new TimeSeriesOptions("temperature");
CreateCollectionOptions collOptions = new CreateCollectionOptions().timeSeriesOptions(tsOptions);
database.createCollection("september2021", collOptions);

To check if you successfully created the collection, send the "listCollections" command to the runCommand() method.

Document commandResult = database.runCommand(new Document("listCollections", new BsonInt64(1)));
List<String> keys = Arrays.asList("cursor");
System.out.println("listCollections: " + commandResult.getEmbedded(keys, Document.class).toJson());

Your output should look similar to the following:

{
 "id": <some number>,
 "ns": "<db name>.$cmd.listCollections",
 "firstBatch": [
  {
    "name": "<time series collection name>",
    "type": "timeseries",
    "options": {
     "expireAfterSeconds": <some number>,
      "timeseries": { ... }
     },
     ...
   },
   ...
 ]
}

Query a Time Series Collection

To query in a time series collection, use the same conventions as you would for retrieving and aggregating data.