When it comes to the usage of storage, one of the interesting statistics from an administrative point of view is perhaps the number of documents in a collection, possibly to estimate future space and memory requirements based on the growth of the data to get high-level statistics of the collection.
To find the stats of the collection, we need to have a server up and running, and a single node should be ok. Refer to the Single node installation of MongoDB recipe in Chapter 1, Installing and Starting the MongoDB Server, for how to start the server. The data on which we will be operating needs to be imported into the database. The steps to import the data are given in the Creating test data recipe in Chapter 2, Command-line Operations and Indexes. Once these steps are completed, we are all set to go ahead with this recipe.