News

MongoDB Releases Major Upgrade to NoSQL Database

• By David Ramel
• April 10, 2014

MongoDB Inc. this week announced the "biggest release ever" of its popular NoSQL database, with improvements coming in the areas of aggregation, text-search integration, query engine performance, security and many more.

"With comprehensive core server enhancements, a groundbreaking new automation tool, and critical enterprise features, MongoDB 2.6 is by far our biggest release ever," said Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder.

With standard and enterprise editions, MongoDB is an open source, document-oriented database popular in Big Data implementations. Instead of storing data in tables or columns, the alternative to traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) uses JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas, what the company calls BSON, short for binary JSON. The company claims MongoDB is the leading NoSQL database, based on metrics such as user searches, job postings and comparison of the skills listed by LinkedIn members, among others.

Horowitz said the company -- originally called 10gen -- used its five years of experience garnered from hundreds of thousands of deployments to create the groundwork for more innovation in the next 10 years.

"You'll see the benefits in better performance and new innovations," Horowitz said. "We re-wrote the entire query execution engine to improve scalability, and took our first step in building a sophisticated query planner by introducing index intersection. We've made the codebase easier to maintain, and made it easier to implement new features. Finally, MongoDB 2.6 lays the foundation for massive improvements to concurrency in MongoDB 2.8, including document-level locking."

According to release notes, both editions of MongoDB feature aggregation enhancements that include the ability to return result sets in any size. Also added were support for variables and new operations that will handle sets and redact data.

Text search is enabled by default in the new release, while the query system now includes a $text operator to resolve text-search queries.

Insert and update improvements include new operations and better consistency of modified data.

A new write operation protocol features improved support for bulk operations and also integrates write operations and write concerns.

Security improvements include better SSL support, x.509 authentication, an enhanced authorization system that features more granular controls, centralized storage of credentials and better tools for user management. The new version also features TLS encryption, along with user-defined roles, auditing functionality and field-level redaction, which Horowitz described as "a critical building block for trusted systems." The database auditing feature is extended by the new capability to integrate with IBM InfoSphere Guardium.

The improved query engine features a new index intersection that will fulfill queries that are supported by more than one index. Also, index filters will limit the indexes that can "become the winning plan for a query." Developers using the database can now use the count method in conjunction with the hint method. You can learn more about that here.

Also counted in the raft of improvements are better geospatial support, index build enhancements and augmented sharding and replication administration.

While many of the listed upgrades are of primary importance to developers, Horowitz emphasized IT operations staffers will also benefit.

"From the very beginning, MongoDB has offered developers a simple and elegant way to manage their data," Horowitz said. "Now we're bringing that same simplicity and elegance to managing MongoDB. MongoDB Management Service (MMS), which already provides 35,000 MongoDB customers with monitoring and alerting, now provides backup and point-in-time restore functionality, in the cloud and on-premises."

Horowitz also teased an automation feature for hosted and on-premise options, coming later this year. He said the "game-changing" automation functionality "will allow you to provision and manage MongoDB replica sets and sharded clusters via a simple yet sophisticated interface."

For more details on the new features in version 2.6, the company will present a webinar titled "What's New in MongoDB" on April 17.