Random record from MongoDB

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

Do a count of all records, generate a random number between 0 and the count, and then do:

db.yourCollection.find().limit(-1).skip(yourRandomNumber).next()