Query one document per association from MongoDB - mongodb

Question

I'm investigating how MongoDB would work for us. One of the most used queries is used to get latest (or from a given time) measurements for each station. There is thousands of stations and each station has tens of thousands of measurements.
So we plan to have one collection for stations and another for measurements.
In SQL we would do the query with
SELECT * FROM measurements
INNER JOIN (
SELECT max(meas_time) station_id
FROM measurements
WHERE meas_time <= 'time_to_query'
GROUP BY station_id
) t2 ON t2.station_id = measurements.station_id
AND t2.meas_time = measurements.meas_time
This returns one measurement for each station, and the measurement is the newest one before the 'time_to_query'.
What query should be used in MongoDB to produce the same result? We are really using Rails and MongoId, but it should not matter.
update:
This question is not about how to perform a JOIN in MongoDB. The fact that in SQL getting the right data out of the table requires a join doesn't necessary mean that in MongoDB we would also need a join. There is only one table used in the query.

Answer 1

We came up with this query
db.measurements.aggregate([{$group:{ _id:{'station_id':"$station_id"}, time:{$max:'$meas_time'}}}]);
with indexes
db.measurements.createIndex({ station_id: 1, meas_time: -1 });
Even though it seems to give the right data it is really slow. Takes roughly a minute to get a bit over 3000 documents from a collection of 65 million.
Just found that MongoDB is not using the index in this query even though we are using the 3.2 version.

Answer 2

I guess worst case solution would be something like this (out of my head):
meassures = []
StationId.all.each do |station|
meassurement = Meassurment.where(station_id: station.id, meas_time <= 'time_to_query').order_by(meas_time: -1).limit(1)
meassures << [station.name, meassurement.measure, ....]
end
It depends on how much time query can take. Data should anyway be indexed by station_id and meas_time.
How much time does the SQL query take?