MongoDB 2.6 keeps pace in database speed wars

The new version of the NoSQL database offers faster performance and a new management console

Working to keep its place in an increasingly heated competitive landscape, MongoDB has updated its namesake open-source NoSQL database system with considerable performance improvements, a new automated management module and stronger security tools.

"MongoDB 2.6 was a major endeavor and bringing it to fruition required hard work and coordination across a rapidly growing team," wrote MongoDB Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Eliot Horowitz, in a blog post. "There is much still to be done, and with MongoDB 2.6, we have a foundation for the next decade of database innovation."

MongoDB is one of a number of NoSQL databases, alongside Cassandra, CouchDB, MariaDB and others.

Such databases are named NoSQL because they sacrifice full relational querying capabilities of regular relational databases in favor of the ability to quickly ingest large amounts of data, which can be easily stored across multiple servers.

Their claims to offer superior performance, however, have been increasingly challenged by traditional relational databases. The most recent releases of both MySQL and PostgreSQL have enjoyed considerable performance boosts.

Not surprisingly, performance has also been improved with the new version of MongoDB. Bulk updating now goes five times as quickly and processing material in the operations log has been sped up by 75 percent.

Performance has been improved in other ways as well.

MongoDB has also been working to make MongoDB more palatable in enterprise settings.

The new version of MongoDB includes a software package, called MongoDB Management Service (MMS), that is designed to help administrators manage large deployments of the database system.

MMS automates a number of storage functions, including incremental backup and point-in-time recovery. It offers alerts on more than 100 different operations.

MMS also includes a number of features that are being tested for a future release, including one-click provisioning and the ability to upgrade the software while it remains in operation.

Automated indexing now takes place only when no user operations are being conducted. Administrators can specify how long a query is allowed to run before it is canceled.

Additionally, MongoDB now offers several new bulk operations, including the ability to add, update and delete large volumes of data in a parallel.

A set of new pipelined data transformations allows users to annotate and transform data as well as write results of a query to a named collection, with no limit on output size.

MongoDB now offers a dedicated search engine for text, eliminating the need to install a separate engine to offer users text searching.

Security has been boosted, especially for enterprise usage. The software now offers authentication through the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and the x509 public key infrastructure format.

First developed by MongoDB (then called 10Gen) in 2007, the MongoDB database system has been downloaded more than 7 million times. Known as a document store, MongoDB saves data in the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, making it easier to access for some types of applications, notably large-scale Web applications.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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