MongoDb 8 has been released, and the developers have said this is the most secure, durable, available, and performant version of MongoDB yet, with significantly reduced memory usage and query times, and more efficient batch processing.
MongoDB is a NoSQL document database that stores its documents in a JSON-like format with schema. MongoDB Atlas is the fully-managed cloud database from the MongoDB team.
The performance improvements mean the MongoDB team has seen 36% better read throughput and 56% faster bulk writes. They have also shown 20% faster concurrent writes during data replication, and 200% faster performance on complex aggregations of times series data. Writing on the MongoDB blog, Jim Scharf, CTO at MongoDB, said:
"In making these improvements, we're seeing benchmarks for typical web applications perform 32% better overall."
Alongside the performance improvements, MongoDB 8.0 does better at sharding, distributing data across shards up to 50 times faster, with reduced need for additional configuration or setup.
There's also better support for search and AI applications through the option of quantized vectors. These are representations of full-fidelity vectors that require up to 96% less memory and are faster to retrieve, but remain accurate.
Data encryption is another area to have been improved with an expansion of MongoDB's Queryable Encryption to also support range queries. This improvement has been developed by MongoDB's Cryptography Research Group. It means customers can encrypt sensitive application data, store it securely as fully randomized encrypted data in the MongoDB database, and run expressive queries on the encrypted data without needing to be experts in cryptography.
Queryable Encryption lets applications encrypt sensitive fields in documents so that they remain encrypted even while the server processes them. There's a whitepaper going into more details on the MongoDB website.
Another area to have been improved is in the provision of greater control when there are unpredictable spikes in usage and sustained periods of high demand. Administrators can now set a default maximum time limit for running queries. They can also set MongoDB to reject recurring types of problematic queries, and set query settings to persist through events like database restarts.
MongoDB 8.0 is available now via MongoDB Atlas, as part of MongoDB Enterprise Advanced for on-premises and hybrid deployments, and as a free download with MongoDB Community Edition.
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