MongoDB has announced that MongoDB 4.0 will support multi-document ACID transactions. The new capability is available starting today through a beta program. MongoDB transactions will provide a globally consistent view of data across replica sets and enforce all-or-nothing execution to maintain data integrity.
“This is the number-one most-requested feature for MongoDB,” said Seong Park, vice president of product marketing for MongoDB, who noted that the new capability does two things.
First, he said, “It fills the last check box,” removing any barrier for new customers. And, second, it will make developers’ lives easier.
In the past, if the single document ACID transaction support MongoDB offered previously was not sufficient, a developer would simply write some additional code to handle the semantics around a transaction, said Park. While this was not a major issue, he said, the new capability eliminates that issue and continues MongoDB’s focus on developer productivity and ease of use.
“We created MongoDB 10 years ago to really drive developer productivity with a database that makes their lives easier and doesn’t require them to deal with the constraints and challenges of working with legacy technology that was designed in a different world in a different time,” said Park. “We wanted to make the developer experience much more natural, much more flexible and give them the power to code and do the things they wanted to do instead of struggling with a data model.”
In addition, the company expects that the new multi-document ACID transaction support will help to drive awareness and greater adoption overall, and particularly in banking and finance, and e-commerce.
So far, MongoDB has been focused on net-new and modern-day applications but it is increasingly seeking enterprise customers start to re-platform and migrate off of relational database systems, said Park.
“That is something that has been driving up the request because it is not just about making the developers more productive but about giving them ‘fearless development’ with the confidence that—even though they didn’t need multi-document ACID transaction support—if requirements for an application change or there is another application sometimes in the future, they know they made a technology choice for a modern-day general-purpose database.”
According to MongoDB, its path to transactions has been a substantial engineering effort that began with the acquisition of the WiredTiger storage engine more than 3 years ago. Since then, the MongoDB engineering team has built out fine-grained consistency and durability guarantees, introduced a global logical clock, refactored cluster metadata management, and done additional work to bring transactions to its customers. The multi-document transactions will be familiar to those developers already accustomed to working with transactions in relational databases, the company says.
MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz, will make a detailed announcement about the new support for multi-document ACID transactions at MongoDB Seattle and via livestream today at approximately 12:10pm ET/9:10am PT.
Information about the Transactions Beta Program is available from the MongoDB website.
MongoDB plans to ship version 4.0 in summer of 2018.