What is the aggregation framework primarily used for?

The aggregation framework in MongoDB is primarily designed for processing data records and returning computed results. This powerful tool allows developers to perform complex data transformations and computations on large sets of documents within a collection. By using stages in the aggregation pipeline, users can filter, group, sort, project, and reshape their data through a series of operations, allowing for detailed analysis and extraction of insights.

The framework provides diverse capabilities for summarizing data—such as computing averages, totals, or counts—enabling users to derive meaningful information from their datasets in an efficient manner. This makes it an essential feature for analytics and reporting tasks within MongoDB.

The other options are not aligned with the primary purpose of the aggregation framework. Deleting datasets is generally managed by different delete operations, creating backups involves other specific commands and utilities, and executing real-time queries is typically associated with queries rather than aggregations which are intended for comprehensive computation and data manipulation.