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MongoDB 2.6 hits general availability – so what's in it?

The latest incarnation of the open-source NoSQL database offers a range of new features designed to appeal to developers and businesses.
Written by Toby Wolpe, Contributor

MongoDB says the latest release of its open-source NoSQL database, which has just reached general availability, is the most significant to date.

Release 2.6 of the document-oriented database, available from Tuesday, introduces greater automation to improve provisioning and management, according to MongoDB.

"This release moves the way we build and run apps an enormous step forward. We are introducing automation features to MMS [MongoDB Management Service]," MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz said in a statement.

"Users can now provision, upgrade and manage their systems through a simple yet sophisticated interface."

MMS now offers continuous, incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, monitoring, visualisation and alerts on more than 100 parameters.

Release 2.6 also provides index intersection, allowing multiple indexes to be employed for a single query. This feature is designed to make it easier to run analyses on changing business questions.

"Developers no longer need to predict all data access patterns in advance as more than one index can be used to optimise a query," MongoDB said.

Another index improvement in 2.6 is the ability to perform indexing in the background, yielding to foreground operations and auto-resuming after restart.

Those features, along with other simplified operations, are designed to cut the cost of operating the database at scale.

MongoDB is playing up the newly-released version's ability to scale more easily and cheaply.

"We have improved the scalability of several critical areas of the database, and completed fundamental changes to the core that will allow us to improve concurrency in MongoDB 2.8 and beyond," Horowitz said.

MongoDB says 2.6 uses network resources more efficiently, with 75 percent faster oplog processing, and improved classes of scan, sort, $in and $all performance.

The integration of text search in 15 languages into the MongoDB Query Language and the Aggregation framework will allow developers to dispense with a separate, dedicated search engine.

In security, release 2.6 offers field-level redaction, custom auditing, LDAP and X.509 authentication, collection-level authorisation, and user-defined roles.

Other features include bulk update operators, allowing parallelised operations across the system, and pipelined data transformations.

"We reduced the effort to add some classes of new features by 100x, built a sophisticated query planner with immense potential for further innovation, redesigned write operations and dramatically simplified the maintenance of MongoDB. This is our biggest release ever," Horowitz said.

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