Deleting Collections

Occasionally you want to remove old collections when they are no longer needed. Removing old collections frees up disk space and eliminates any overhead, such as indexing, associated with the collection.

To delete a collection in the MongoDB shell, you need to switch to the correct database, get the collection object, and then call the drop() function on that object. For example, the following code deletes the newCollection collection from the testDB database, as shown in Figure 12.8:

Click here to view code image

use testDB
show collections
coll = db.getCollection("newCollection")
coll.drop()
show collections

Figure 12.8 Deleting a collection in the MongoDB shell.