Grouping by non-numeric fields

Hi,

I would like to write a query in ES that shows counts for each
person's name, equivalent to the following SQL query:

select name, count() from people group by name;

I found a similar request here: https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/#issue/539

Does this feature already exist in the most recent version of ES? If
yes, which facet should I use? I looked at terms and histogram facets,
and they don't seem to be appropriate.

If anyone has implemented this before, please share your knowledge.

Thank you,
Eugene.