10gen Upgrades MongoDB, Unveils Enterprise Version

MongoDB is hot. The open-source, document database is one of the most popular noSQL technologies in the market. It's why giant hosting provides SoftLayer and Rackspace have both placed their chips on the technology in their own ways. SoftLayer is working closely with MongoDB developer 10gen for its offering, while Rackspace acquired database-as-a-service provider ObjectRocket.

10gen has now released version 2.4 of MongoDB, which has a slew of new features and a new enterprise version to keep the MongoDB momentum going. MongoDB 2.4 enhances management, performance and developer productivity, while the enterprise commercial version adds some key features around private monitoring and security.

“We think the community is going to be excited about this release, as it incorporates features that our users have been requesting including hashed-based sharding, text search and faster counts,” said Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and CTO of 10gen. “We’re also supporting our enterprise customers with a new edition of MongoDB that responds to their needs related to monitoring and security of their infrastructure.”

MongoDB 2.4 key features and enhancements include:

Hashed-based Sharding – MongoDB provides horizontal scaling by transparently sharding data across multiple physical servers. Hashed-based sharding enables simple, even distribution of reads and writes to data in MongoDB. So basically, this is how you make data really big, spread across multiple computers. Previously, it had only range-based sharding, which required knowledge of the data up front. Now, it hashes a value for you and provides an automatic even distribution of writes. Hash-based sharding makes everything easier and will be of interest to the community.

Capped Arrays –  Applications provide real-time visibility into top ranking attributes, such as leaderboards and most frequently viewed, emailed or purchased items. Capped Arrays simplify development by automatically maintaining a sorted array of fixed length within documents. In layman’s terms, one example where this is used is if you’re building a gaming application and tracking a leaderboard, or top 10 articles on a blog etc.

Text Search (Beta) –  Search is the primary interface for navigating data in many applications. MongoDB’s native, real-time text search simplifies development and deployment for MongoDB users with stemming and tokenization in 15 languages. In layman’s terms, if you’re building an app and you want “search” to be a featured part of it, now you can do that. Before, you’d have to integrate outside search functionality. It will be good enough for most applications, and there are connectors for outside search technologies.

Geospatial Enhancements – Mobile and social applications and government programs rely on location and sophisticated geospatial analysis. MongoDB 2.4 introduces GeoJSON support, a more accurate spherical model and polygon intersections.

Faster Counts – Count operation performance has improved, including low cardinality index-based counts that are 20x faster than prior releases of MongoDB.

New enterprise subscription level includes security, private monitoring

In addition, 10gen introduced MongoDB Enterprise as part of a new MongoDB Enterprise subscription level. MongoDB Enterprise contains new monitoring and security features including Kerberos Authentication and Role-based Privileges.

Features of the Enterprise version include:

On-Prem Monitoring – Monitoring, visualization and alerting on more than 100 operational metrics of a MongoDB system in real time. 10gen offers a free monitoring service as well; the big difference here is that it’s a private and on-premises version.  The free MongoDB monitoring service lets you install an agent and use a free cloud based monitoring tool. Every minute, it shifts data to the cloud, and you can visualize the data. “That service has been widely successful,” said Kelly Stirman, Director of Product Marketing . “Since version 2.2, (about 6 months) we’ve had 40 percent growth with this service. The growth of the monitoring service is important because it’s an indicator of MongoDB increasingly being used in production." The ability to run on-prem monitoring will make MongoDB more appealing in the enterprise.

Kerberos Authentication – Version 2.4 adds support for the Kerberos protocol. Enterprise applications can now securely authenticate with MongoDB using this widely adopted standard. Kerboros  is really important to banks, insurance companies, and federal government, so it’s a solid feature for the commercial version.

Role-based Privileges – The ability to separate responsibilities for server, database and cluster administration.

MongoDB passed the 4 million download in the last month or so. “People fall in love with MongoDB because it is ridiculously easy to use,” said Kelly Stirman, Director of Product Marketing. “You can start querying the data in a few minutes. It has super-fast performance (and) high availability.”

10gen has more than 600 commercial customers including many of the world’s leading brands, such as Cisco, Craigslist, Disney, EA, eBay, Ericsson, Forbes, Foursquare, Intuit, LexisNexis, McAfee, MTV, Salesforce.com, Shutterfly and Telefonica. Common use cases include operational and analytical big data, content management and delivery, mobile and social infrastructure, user data management and data hub.

“10gen has raised the bar on what to expect for quick and easy live database monitoring,” said Harun Yardımcı, Software Architect, eBay. “On-Prem Monitoring allows us to actively diagnose application issues quickly and easily to improve our MongoDB-powered application’s performance and ultimately provides a superior experience for our customers, which is our top priority.”