MongoDB Acquires WiredTiger and its Open Source Storage Engine

MongoDB has acquired WiredTiger, a company with database storage engine technology. WiredTiger will be integrated into MongoDB for performance, scalability, and hardware efficiency gains in the upcoming MongoDB 2.8. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

MongoDB is one of the front runners in the high-growth NoSQL database market with a vast community of developers as supporters. It has acted as the foundation for companies like Compose, which built its initial offering around MongoDB. In 2013, Rackspace acquired ObjectRocket, a database-as-a-service offering that uses MongoDB.

The database has grown in popularity during the last five years. The company raised a $150 million in financing in 2013, one of the largest single rounds of funding for a database startup at the time. The company has been using the financing to further develop the technology and expand its reach globally.

Some of that work is in the upcoming release. It supports “pluggable storage engines,” which are essentially capabilities that are easily plugged into the database extending MongoDB and optimizing it for different hardware architectures. These extensions will make MongoDB applicable for a wider variety of applications, lower cost and lower overall complexity.

WiredTiger is an open source storage engine used to power many high-performance systems, including services at Amazon. Combining and leveraging modern hardware architecture and software algorithms, it juices up application performance. The benefits are lower storage costs, greater hardware utilization and more predictable performance.

The acquisition comes with talent in the form of co-founders Keith Bostic and Michael Cahill and colleagues. They were architects of BerkeleyDB, widely-used embedded data management software.

"Our focus at WiredTiger has been to rethink data management and create high performance software that solves the challenges of the world's most demanding applications," said Michael Cahill, now director of engineering at MongoDB, in a company release. "MongoDB has long been on our radar. Joining its vast community is a huge opportunity for WiredTiger to more broadly benefit organizations of all sizes, in all industries, around the globe."