Renaming a collection

Have you ever come across a scenario where you have named a table in a relational database and at a later point of time felt that the name could have been better? Or perhaps the organization you work for was late in realizing that the table names are really getting messy and enforce some standards on the names? Relational databases do have some proprietary ways to rename the tables and a database admin would do that for you.

This raises a question though. In Mongo world, where collections are synonymous to tables, is there a way to rename a collection to some other name after it is created? In this recipe, we will explore this feature of Mongo where we rename an existing collection with some data in it.

Getting ready

We would need to run a MongoDB instance to perform this collection renaming experiment. Refer to the recipe Installing single node MongoDB in Chapter 1, Installing and Starting the Server for information on how to start the server. The operations we will perform...