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MongoDB has introduced MongoDB 3.0. Key enhancements include a flexible storage architecture that supports pluggable storage engines including the WiredTiger technology acquired last year, as well as MongoDB Ops Manager, a new management application for DBAs and operations teams that aims to reduce the management overhead posed by diverse MongoDB deployments. MongoDB 3.0 will be generally available in early March.
According to MongoDB, with the 3.0 release and the new Ops Manager, organizations can now leverage the essential capabilities they have come to expect with relational databases – mature management tools, a powerful query language, comprehensive indexes, and a strong consistency model – while benefiting from the innovations of the NoSQL movement including a flexible document data model, horizontal scalability, global always-on architecture, and high performance.
MongoDB 3.0 Supports Multiple Storage Engines
In the 3.0 release, said Stirman, “We have re-architected MongoDB to support multiple storage engines so users can choose the one that is best for their applications.” With this release, MongoDB is providing three options. The first is the same engine the database has had since its inception with some enhancements – optimized for read-intensive applications. The second engine is WiredTiger. And the third option that users can choose from is an in-memory storage engine.
According to Stirman, WiredTiger was founded by the same team that founded BerkeleyDB which was subsequently acquired by Oracle. With the new WiredTiger-based storage engine option, users get two big advantages, said Stirman. One is a about a 7x to 10x improvement in write performance. “That is a huge step forward for a database to make that kind of improvement in a single release,” said Stirman. “And the second thing is compression. MongoDB has never had it, and with this release, most people will see a 50% to 80% reduction in storage. If your database was 1TB before, it can be as small as 200GB with Wired Tiger.”
For maximum flexibility across diverse workloads, storage engines can be mixed in a replica set, and upgrades to a new storage engine are non-disruptive to applications. In addition, the company says, the pluggable storage engine API opens the door for the MongoDB ecosystem to deliver specialized storage innovations in the future.
MongoDB 3.0 Introduces Ops Manager, a New Application for Managing MongoDB Deployments
The new release also introduces Ops Manager, a new application for managing MongoDB deployments that integrates with popular operations tools, and can reduces operational overhead by as much as 95%. Based on the MongoDB Management Service (MMS), MongoDB Ops Manager provides an on-premise software solution that enables operations teams and DBAs to deploy, upgrade, monitor and back up their systems with the click of a button and no downtime. MongoDB Ops Manager automates best practices developed with thousands of customer deployments, and is available immediately as part of MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a package of advanced software, support, and certifications.
Ops Manager addresses the particular requirements of large organizations. “MongoDB has had a reputation over the years of being easy to use and get started with,” said Stirman. “However, the criticism has been that, as easy as it is to get started, when organizations get up to tens or hundreds of servers, MongoDB is actually a lot of work to manage. In almost every company, one of the most precious resources is the DBAs' time because there are not enough of them to go around. So - while MongoDB lets you do things you could never do before - if your DBAs can’t support the system you are kind of stuck. Ops Manager is an application that takes most of the work that a DBA does – from installations to upgrades to configuration changes and maintenance operations, backups, point-in-time recovery, monitoring, performance alerts – and it packages all of that into a polished application that lets you perform all of these tasks with the click of a button no matter whether your deployment is one server or a thousand servers.”
Supporting the security and compliance requirements of large organizations, an auditing framework introduced in MongoDB 2.6 has been extended to include all system and data operations (DDL & DML) to the database. With these extensions, administrators can now construct and filter audit trails for any operation against MongoDB without third-party tools; role-based auditing has been added to enhance its selectivity. Auditing is available as part of MongoDB Enterprise Advanced.
“The market has been incredibly enthusiastic about MongoDB in the 5 years since the first production release of the product,” said Stirman, who pointed to 2,000 customers, more than 10,000 downloads of the database per day, and 34 of the Fortune 100 running MongoDB in production. “However,” he added, “that is indicative of a lot of early adoption and people who were willing to work with a technology that was younger and not as mature as the traditional databases that they have been using for decades. The criticism of MongoDB has been two things – it is difficult to scale writes and it is difficult to manage large systems. With this release, we are really removing those objections entirely. And, it is an indication from the MongoDB community to large organizations that MongoDB is really and truly ready for prime time.”
Learn more at www.mongodb.com.