MongoDB fast count of subdocuments - maybe trough index - mongodb

Question

I'm using MongoDB 4.0 on mongoDB Atlas cluster (3 replicas - 1 shard).
Assuming i have a collection that contains multiple documents.
Each of this documents holding an array out of subdocuments that represent cities in a certain year with additional information. An example document would look like that (i removed unessesary information to simplify example):
{_id:123,
cities:[
{name:"vienna",
year:1985
},
{name:"berlin",
year:2001
}
{name:"vienna",
year:1985
}
]}
I have a compound index on and year. What is the fastest way to count the occurrences of name and year combinations?
I already tried the following aggregation:
[{$unwind: {
path: '$cities'
}}, {$group: {
_id: {
name: 'cities.name',
year: '$cities.year'
},
count: {
$sum: 1
}
}}, {$project: {
count: 1,
name: '$_id.name',
year: '$_id.year',
_id: 0
}}]
Another approach i tried was a map-reduce in the following form - the map reduce performed a bit better ~30% less time needed.
map function:
function m() {
for (var i in this.cities) {
emit({
name: this.cities[i].name,
year: this.cities[i].year
},
1);
}
}
reduce function (also tried to replace sum with length, but surprisingly sum is faster):
function r(id, counts) {
return Array.sum(counts);
}
function call in mongoshell:
db.test.mapReduce(m,r,{out:"mr_test"})
Now i was asking myself - Is it possible to access the index? As far as i know it is a B+ tree that holds the pointers to the relevant documents on disk, therefore from a technical point of view I think is would be possible to iterate through all leaves of the index tree and just counting the pointers? Does anybody if this is possible?
Does anybody knows another way to solve this approach in a high performant way? (It is not possible to change the design, because of other dependencies of the software, we are running this on a very big dataset). Has anybody maybe experience in solve such task via shards?

Answer 1

The index will not be very helpful in this situation.
MongoDB indexes were designed for identifying documents that match a given critera.
If you create an index on {cities.name:1, cities.year:1}
This document:
{_id:123,
cities:[
{name:"vienna",
year:1985
},
{name:"berlin",
year:2001
}
{name:"vienna",
year:1985
}
]}
Will have 2 entries in the b-tree that refer to this document:
vienna|1985
berlin|2001
Even if it were possible to count the incidence of a specific key in the index, this does not necessarily correspond.
MongoDB does not provide a method to examine the raw entries in an index, and it explicitly refuses to use an index on a field containing an array for counting.
The MongoDB count command and helper functions all count documents, not elements inside of them. As you noticed, you can unwind the array and count the items in an aggregation pipeline, but at that point you've already loaded all of the documents into memory, so it's too late to make use of an index.