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$count (aggregation)

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  • Definition
  • Compatibility
  • Syntax
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  • Example
$count

Passes a document to the next stage that contains a count of the number of documents input to the stage.

Note

Disambiguation

This page describes the $count aggregation pipeline stage. For the $count aggregation accumulator, see $count (aggregation accumulator).

You can use $count for deployments hosted in the following environments:

  • MongoDB Atlas: The fully managed service for MongoDB deployments in the cloud

$count has the following prototype form:

{ $count: <string> }

<string> is the name of the output field which has the count as its value. <string> must be a non-empty string, must not start with $ and must not contain the . character.

Tip

See also:

The return type is represented by the smallest type that can hold the final value of count: integerlongdouble

The $count stage is equivalent to the following $group + $project sequence:

db.collection.aggregate( [
{ $group: { _id: null, myCount: { $sum: 1 } } },
{ $project: { _id: 0 } }
] )

where myCount would be the output field that contains the count. You can specify another name for the output field.

Tip

See also:

db.collection.countDocuments() which wraps the $group aggregation stage with a $sum expression.

A collection named scores has the following documents:

{ "_id" : 1, "subject" : "History", "score" : 88 }
{ "_id" : 2, "subject" : "History", "score" : 92 }
{ "_id" : 3, "subject" : "History", "score" : 97 }
{ "_id" : 4, "subject" : "History", "score" : 71 }
{ "_id" : 5, "subject" : "History", "score" : 79 }
{ "_id" : 6, "subject" : "History", "score" : 83 }

The following aggregation operation has two stages:

  1. The $match stage excludes documents that have a score value of less than or equal to 80 to pass along the documents with score greater than 80 to the next stage.

  2. The $count stage returns a count of the remaining documents in the aggregation pipeline and assigns the value to a field called passing_scores.

db.scores.aggregate(
[
{
$match: {
score: {
$gt: 80
}
}
},
{
$count: "passing_scores"
}
]
)

The operation returns the following results:

{ "passing_scores" : 4 }

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$collStats