MongoDB 2.6 Released, the Company's Most Significant One till Date

New York based MongoDB has been steadily gaining popularity for its open source NoSQL database software, which is being widely being considered for Big Data deployments. The company has just announced its next major release of the software, MongoDB 2.6. According to the company, this is the company's most significant release till date.

The new release is supposed to make building applications natural and intuitive, and running these apps will also be just as natural. According to Eliot Horowitz, the company's CTO and co-founder, "The core of MongoDB has served the community well for the past five years. In 2007, we set out to prove that a new data model could fundamentally improve the way developers build and run applications. Now we move the industry forward with a management service that improves the way we run apps, freeing up organizations to focus even more on what they do best."

Horowitz stressed upon the fact that the new release makes it far easier to manage day to day operations. Besides so many new features (mentioned below), several small changes have also been done to the core kernel that make a significant impact on the databases. Indexing for instance, runs in the background in parallel to whatever the user is doing at the front-end. There's a backup tool, now a part of the MMS, which gives the most powerful control over all assets of your back-up.

The automation tools allow for easier upgradation and management of 100s or 1000s of machines without worrying about downtime. It allows you to simply and safely managing clusters. You can build, manage, upgrade, or add/remove capacity, with great simplicity. MongoDB 2.6 works with VMware, Openstack, and all your existing environments.

According to MongoDB CEO Max Schireson, "In five short years, the MongoDB community has transformed the data management landscape, creating the first compelling alternative to 40 years of relational databases," He further added, "we have created a new and liberating data model, demonstrated mass appeal, significantly improved how engineers build and run modern applications, and secured funding to ensure MongoDB continues for decades to come. With this release we have made massive investments in the database to ensure a strong foundation for continued innovation."

-----------Q and A with Eliot Horowitz, Co-Founder MongoDB---------------

Q> Just how much faster is MongoDB 2.6 over the previous release?

Eliot: The query execution engine and indexing are now much faster. In fact, queries that would take a very long take or were simply impossible to run, are now possible. In fact, they're now orders of magnitudes faster.

Q> How much faster will it be to prepare a PoC for a large deployment with MongoDB 2.6?

Eliot: Thanks to the automation tools in the new release, barring the initial setup, scripting and configuration, what used to take a couple of days can now be done in just fifteen minutes.

Q> With so many new features, is there an impact on system requirements?

Eliot: It works out to be roughly the same. There's no major impact.

Q> What sort of alerts does the new MMS generate now? What are the significant additions?

Eliot: Some of them are very simple. For instance, you can set custom thresholds on any message you want, e.g. send me an email when I'm doing more than a 1000 inserts a second. This gives you a lot more power and a lot more advanced rules.

Q> The new release now offers bulk update operators. What was there in the earlier release?

Eliot: There was no bulk update in the previous version, only bulk insert. We completed re-did the way it happens on the network in MongoDB 2.6.

Q> The new release removes all output size limits for $outstage result sets. What was the limit in the previous release?

Eliot: The limit in the previous release was 16 MB, but now, there's no limit on the end or intermediate result. Any company that's using iterations, aggregation, analytics, will find this useful.

Q> MongoDB 2.6 now allows indexing to be done in the background. What's the impact of this on system operation? Does it slow down the entire ops?

Eliot: The indexing process will always have lower priority over the foreground ops. User actions always take precedence over background processes, so it will not really impact system performance. Rather, it will help speed up the operations.

Q> You mentioned that MongoDB 2.6 offers expanded SNMP support. What are the benefits of doing that?

Eliot: It's all about making sure that the software integrates better with SNMP monitoring systems.

---------------End of Interview------------------------

Next Page: Key Features

MMS: The MongoDB Management Service simplifies the way organizations run MongoDB systems at scale. MMS now includes continuous, incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, monitoring, visualization and alerts on 100+ parameters. It offers on-premise deployments for MongoDB subscribers and a fully-managed solution in the cloud.

Index Intersection: This feature provides more flexible, adaptive analytical capabilities, making it easier to run ad-hoc analyses to answer evolving business questions. Developers no longer need to predict all the data access patterns in advance as more than one index can be used to optimize a query.

Improved Scalability & Performance: Organizations can now scale more easily and at a lower cost. MongoDB 2.6 allows more efficient use of network resources, with oplog processing becoming 75% faster. The classes of scan, sort, $in and $all performance have been significantly improved and bulk operators for writes improve updates by as much as 5x.

Text Search: Users have come to expect search as a primary means of accessing data in apps. Developers can now deliver search as a feature without the added complexity of a separate, dedicated search engine.

MongoDB 2.6 integrates text search into the MongoDB Query Language and the Aggregation Framework, and provides powerful search for 15 languages.

Enterprise Security: MongoDB 2.6 builds on the support in MongoDB Enterprise 2.4 for roles, Kerberos Authentication, and SSL encryption. MongoDB Enterprise 2.6 adds field-level security, customizable auditing,

LDAP and x509 authentication, collection-level authorization, and user-defined roles.

Bulk Update Operators: Organizations can now manipulate large data volumes more efficiently because the new bulk operations make it simple and efficient to load, update and delete large volumes of data in

MongoDB. Bulk operations automatically parallelize updates across the system, and return a report of failed

operations that can be retried by the application.

Pipelined Data Transformations: Data can be summarized, enhanced, aggregated and refined to better serve users from within the database. MongoDB 2.6 provides multi-step data enrichment and

transformations natively in the database using a simple declarative interface. With the new $out stage, results sets from the aggregation pipeline can be written to a named collection with no limit to the output

size.

Simplified Operations: MongoDB 2.6 allows the indexing to be performed in the background, yielding to foreground operations, and auto-resumes after restart. With MaxTimeMS, operators and developers can specify auto-cancellation of queries, providing better control of resource utilization; mixed SSL connections; expanded SNMP support; and more efficient repair operations.