Mongodb – How to drop a MongoDB database from the command line

As of Mongo 3.2 the answers to this question are mostly no longer correct. The new $lookup operator added to the aggregation pipeline is essentially identical to a left outer join:

https://docs.mongodb.org/master/reference/operator/aggregation/lookup/#pipe._S_lookup

From the docs:

{
   $lookup:
     {
       from: <collection to join>,
       localField: <field from the input documents>,
       foreignField: <field from the documents of the "from" collection>,
       as: <output array field>
     }
}

Of course Mongo is not a relational database, and the devs are being careful to recommend specific use cases for $lookup, but at least as of 3.2 doing join is now possible with MongoDB.

Starting with the 3.2 release of MongoDB, you can get N random docs from a collection using the $sample aggregation pipeline operator:

// Get one random document from the mycoll collection.
db.mycoll.aggregate([{ $sample: { size: 1 } }])

If you want to select the random document(s) from a filtered subset of the collection, prepend a $match stage to the pipeline:

// Get one random document matching {a: 10} from the mycoll collection.
db.mycoll.aggregate([
    { $match: { a: 10 } },
    { $sample: { size: 1 } }
])

As noted in the comments, when size is greater than 1, there may be duplicates in the returned document sample.