The combined value potential presented by MongoDB to the workflows of CIOs, DBAs, business analysts, and data scientists, remains unrivalled by other document oriented databases systems. This has led MongoDB to become a universal favorite ever since its first launch in March 2009. It is for no reason that major players utilizing max potential of databases, like LinkedIn, Craigslist and eBay prefer MongoDB as their backend database. Their choice is based on some key advantages offered by MongoDB as below –
- Automatic shard rebalancing
- Development ease through schema free persistence
- On demand shard optimization
- High performance replication
- Grid file system of storage
- Multiple indexes powers up lookup and searches
- Optimal handling of very large data sets spanning petabytes of data and 100’s of millions of SQL queries per day
Looking at the worldwide penetration of the backend system, MongoDB has attempted to bring in several enhancements in its feature sets from time to time. Right from its first version update in August 2009 to the latest in Nov 2015, MongoDB continues to improve upon its functionalities that help its customers to progress ahead with changing times and evolving technological landscape.
With its Nov 2015 update (version 3.2), MongoDB has provided some good tweaks and updates to developers and business users alike. Let’s look at some of these features and updates at a quick glance.
Architectural updates
- Storage Engine – WiredTiger has now become the default storage engine. With up to 80% compression and 7-10x improvement in write throughput, this improvement will ease DBAs lives considerably.
- In-memory storage engine – This facility is still in beta stage. It offers immense advantage in form of low latency, high availability, and superior throughput
- Replication protocol – By default the replication protocol is now set to ‘1’ instead of ‘0’ as provided in earlier versions. Also the electionTimeoutMillis function helps detect unreachable replica set in milliseconds.
- Data governance – With GUI based schema locating and visualization, DBAs will be happy with the simplification of data governance with version 3.2
Security updates
- Encryption – Along with the architectural change, the storage engine also gets encryption facility for end to end encryption of data in MongoDB Enterprise edition.
- Field validation – The open source version offers basic data validation on fields. Called as Server-18227, it helps in validation of values entered in select fields at time of document creation.
Tools updates
- Archive option - A new ‘archive’ option brings in support for archive files using the mongodump and mongorestore
- Dump file compression option - A new ‘—gzip’ function helps reduce storage capacity taken up by dump files using the mongodump and mongorestore
- Text search – A version 3 of text index helps bring about multiple benefits to text search facility
- Better results with case sensitivity
- The index now doesn’t distinguish between characters (e.g. é, ê) with diacritical symbols and those without it (e.g. e)
- Language support – The new version now supports Arabic, Farsi Chinese and Urdu
Coding updates
- Shell updates – The MongoDB shell gets improvements in form of new methods such as findOneAndDelete(), deleteMany(), findOneAndReplace(), and insertMany()
- Partial indexes – You can now index only that document that meets a pre-defined criteria. This helps lower the resource requirement and performance costs.
- Readconcern – This new query function in the WiredTiger engine lets users to select the level of isolation for their reads
Analytics updates
- The new update offers full integration with popular SQL-based Business Intelligence suite of tools and applications. This makes complex data exploration and analysis easier for business analysts
- The muscled up aggregation function has multiple improvement
- Within the aggregation process, you can now pull data from a different data collection with $lookup.
- sample stage helps to lookup random sample of documents from amongst top N documents in a collection.
- Arithmetic operators and new array operations add more power to aggregation process.
Operations updates
- The management platform now offers 10-20x productivity boost with help of Ops and Cloud Manger to run MongoDB.
- Full integration with Application Performance Monitoring Platforms.
- Deep dive enabled with Visual query performance diagnostics.
- Resource utilization is enhanced with partial indexes.
- On-going uptime spanning distributed deployment spread across geographical location will help boost operational productivity and bring downtime to a halt.
To sign off
Through a series of updates, tweaks, additions, and workarounds,MongoDB has continued to impress users with its scalability, versatility, and robust architecture. All in all, the update (one of the most comprehensive ever in MongoDB) will help users extend the utility and practical value of the application for their current business use cases. Do write in to us and let us know which one feature you would be tremendously excited about within your organization.
