mongodb count num of distinct values per field/key

MongoDB has a distinct command which returns an array of distinct values for a field; you can check the length of the array for a count.

There is a shell db.collection.distinct() helper as well:

> db.countries.distinct('country');
[ "Spain", "England", "France", "Australia" ]

> db.countries.distinct('country').length
4

As noted in the MongoDB documentation:

Results must not be larger than the maximum BSON size (16MB). If your results exceed the maximum BSON size, use the aggregation pipeline to retrieve distinct values using the $group operator, as described in Retrieve Distinct Values with the Aggregation Pipeline.