10gen, a company that develops and supports MongoDB, has announced version 1.8 of the scalable data store.
"MongoDB is an open source database that is designed to be very scalable and to be very flexible and agile for developers. One of the key ways that we achieve that is with a document-oriented data model," Max Schireson, president, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We let you store objects in the database in the format in which you are using them in your applications and that makes developers much more agile and much more productive. It is a much more flexible model, and it also lends itself to much greater scalability."
The latest version of MongoDB adds several new features, including journaling that allows for fast recovery in the case of a crash, support for covered and sparse indexes, and incremental map/reduce. In addition to these new features, 10gen says it continued to invest in MongoDB's performance and scale-out capabilities, with improvements to replication and sharding in this newest release.
While this version of MongoDB is an incremental release, "we think it is a very important incremental release," notes Schireson. "In particular, one of the features - journaling - will make systems very robust even in single server deployments," he notes. "Historically, our approach to users achieving robustness was to allow for a redundancy in the deployment, where data could be stored in multiple servers - and that is a great solution for a lot of large scale deployments, but users would also like to know that even on a single server, their data is safe and that is something we support now in 1.8 with the journaling." The addition of journaling, Schireson says, "grew out of a number of mission-critical deployments, where reliability was really important to our users."
With journaling enabled, MongoDB can be quickly restarted following a crash without needing to repair the collections. The addition of this feature, Schireson points out, "grew out of a number of mission-critical deployments, where reliability was really important to our users." Support for covered indexes, he adds, is an important feature as well, "because it lets users resolve simple queries very quickly and at very high volumes."
10gen develops MongoDB, and offers production support, training, and consulting for the database. For more information, visit www.10gen.com or www.mongodb.org.