MongoDB, Inc., the company behind the leading modern, general purpose database platform, have announced the release of MongoDB 3.6.
“MongoDB was created by developers, for developers to provide a modern database designed for today’s highly sophisticated applications. This latest release delivers key innovations that once again raise the bar for what developers should demand from their database, enabling them to focus their time on building compelling applications that transform their businesses,” said Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO, MongoDB. “With MongoDB 3.6, it’s now easier and faster to build always-on applications that react in real time to changes in data streamed across distributed systems. And with new and enhanced management and security features, developers get the freedom and confidence to run MongoDB in the most demanding environments to support mission-critical applications.”
Speed to develop
MongoDB 3.6 helps organisations move at the speed of their data by making developers dramatically more productive.
“MongoDB has always aimed to make developers more productive by giving them the most friction-free means of working with data,” said Eliot Horowitz, CTO and Co-Founder, MongoDB. “With advancements like change streams and retryable writes, MongoDB 3.6 handles critical tasks at the database layer that used to take up developer time and energy. Extensions to the query language make array updates and joins more expressive, and new security features curb the possibility of MongoDB instances being left mistakenly exposed.”
Key advancements include:
- Change streams, which enable developers to build reactive web, mobile and IoT applications that can view, filter and act on data changes as they occur in the database. Whenever data is changed in MongoDB, the updates are automatically reflected in real time in the application. For example, a weather application that pulls from constantly changing datasets as the weather shifts would have previously required a developer to write application code that periodically polls the database for updates, limiting the application’s ability to provide an accurate, real-time user experience. Change streams automates that process, freeing up developer time for more important work while providing the best application experience.
- Retryable writes, which move the complexity of handling systems failures from the application to the database. Instead of developers having to implement custom, client-side code to handle network errors during updates, MongoDB automatically retries writes.
- MongoDB Compass, which allows users to easily analyse and understand database schema, now includes query auto-complete, query history and table views. For users who are looking for other features, the new Compass Plugin Framework gives them the power to build and distribute plugins to make MongoDB Compass their ideal navigation tool.
- MongoDB Compass Community, which provides developers with a new, no-cost, GUI alternative to the MongoDB shell, supporting the latest functionality in the Compass family.
“MongoDB 3.6 continues the company’s tradition of delivering features that make developers’ lives easier and keep them focused on delivering great applications,” said Boban Glisovic, Head of Cloud Marketplace Services, Swisscom. “The latest additions, such as extended support for S3 backup, have great potential to help ensure Swisscom delivers the best technology experience to our customers.”
Speed to scale
MongoDB 3.6 makes it easier for operations teams to deploy and run massively scalable, secure, always-on global applications built on MongoDB’s native distributed systems facilities. Key advancements include:
- MongoDB Ops Manager, which allows users to manage, optimise, secure and back up globally distributed clusters, now has a new Data Explorer, Real-Time Performance Panel and Performance Advisor. Ops Manager 3.6 makes it easier than ever for ops teams to inspect and improve database performance in real time.
- Schema governance with JSON schema, which lets developers and ops teams combine the flexibility of the document model with true data conformance and validation capabilities to precisely the degree that best suits their application. Because schema validation is fully tunable, teams can add pinpoint validation to only the critical fields of their model, or start a project with data governance appropriate to the development stage and tighten them during production stages. Now teams can benefit from the ease of development that the document model offers, while still maintaining the strict data governance controls that are critical for applications in regulated industries.
Deploy anywhere
MongoDB provides users with the flexibility of complete platform independence — on-premise, hybrid or fully-managed cloud — with the freedom to move between deployment options as business requirements change.
- MongoDB Atlas, the Database-as-a-Service for MongoDB, gives users access to all of the core features of MongoDB 3.6 and runs on all major public clouds — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. MongoDB Atlas meets the SOC2 Type 1 compliance standard for data safety, privacy and security.
- Cross region replication now allows MongoDB Atlas clusters to span multiple cloud provider regions, maintaining continuous availability in the event of geographic outages as well as providing optimal customer experience by locating data closer to users.
Speed to insight
MongoDB 3.6 improves the ability of data analysts and business intelligence (BI) professionals to drive real-time action by generating complex analytics and visualisations from live operational data. Key advancements include:
- The aggregation pipeline, which allows users to perform real-time analytics directly in the database, has been enhanced with more expressive queries giving organisations faster access to data-driven insights. Developers and analysts can now write queries combining data from multiple collections for complex analytics while greatly reducing the amount of data that needs to be computed in the BI layer.
- MongoDB’s Connector for BI, which enables use of MongoDB as a data source in SQL-based analytics and data visualisation tools, takes advantage of these enhancements to deliver higher performance, with more analytic operations pushed natively to the database. Users can now also configure, deploy and monitor the BI Connector directly from Ops Manager.
Together, these enhancements eliminate the complexity and latency that comes from having to move operational data into dedicated analytics systems.
“Agility is the key critical success factor for any enterprise seeking to compete effectively through customer engagement and customer experience technology,” says Carl Olofson, research vice president for Data Management Software at IDC. “That agility is expressed both in terms of speed and flexibility in handling various data formats and volumes, as well as speed in terms of application innovation. Often, one’s data management technology is an inhibitor in both regards. MongoDB 3.6, with its features that address both dimensions of agility as well as increasing demands for better security and geographic flexibility, is well poised to power the functionality that will make enterprises winners in this digitally driven economy.”
MongoDB 3.6 continues to build out security protection with two new enhancements:
- The most popular installer for MongoDB already limits network access by binding to localhost by default. With MongoDB 3.6, this default behaviour is implemented directly in the server itself, so all MongoDB packages across all platforms refuse all external connections to the database unless otherwise explicitly configured by the administrator.
- Combined with new IP whitelisting support, administrators can configure MongoDB to only accept external connections on approved IP addresses. These enhancements greatly reduce the risk of unsecured MongoDB instances unintentionally being deployed into production where they might be at risk from malicious actors.
