Mongo does not have a max() function, how do I work around this?

Question

I have a MongoDB collection and need to find the max() value of a certain field across all docs. This value is the timestamp and I need to find the latest doc by finding th

Answer 1

if you have an index on the timestsamp field, finding the highest value is efficientl something like

db.things.find().sort({ts:-1}).limit(1)

but if having an index is too much overhead storing the max in a separate collection might be good.