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​MongoDB snaps up WiredTiger and its storage expert team

As well as acquiring storage-engine company WiredTiger, open-source database firm MongoDB is bringing on board the architects behind the technology.
Written by Toby Wolpe, Contributor
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Eliot Horowitz: Complementary technologies and teams.
Image: MongoDB
Barely a month after announcing that MongoDB Version 2.8 is available with the WiredTiger storage engine, MongoDB says it has acquired the firm behind the technology.

The acquisition on undisclosed terms also involves WiredTiger co-founders Keith Bostic and Michael Cahill and their colleagues moving across to the open-source document database company.

Bostic and Cahill originally developed the popular Berkeley DB open-source library, now owned by Oracle.

"Keith and Michael are both luminaries in the fields of data storage and transaction management, and they and the entire WiredTiger team are on exactly the same page as we are. They are true paragons of the free software movement, and on their team, 15 years' experience in the field makes you a relative newcomer," MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz wrote in a blog.

"As much as the synergy was obvious from the standpoint of complementary technologies, it was even more obvious from a team composition standpoint."

The inclusion in Version 2.8 of open-source WiredTiger, which MongoDB describes as a modern, high-performance, high-throughput storage engine, is designed to give the NoSQL database greatly improved performance for high write-volume workloads.

In addition to compression and record-level locking, WiredTiger also gives MongoDB multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), multi-document transactions, and support for log-structured merge-trees, or LSM trees, for very high insert workloads.

MongoDB stands in fifth place behind Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL in the DB-Engines database popularity table and is the top-ranked NoSQL database.

According to Horowitz, WiredTiger will continue as a project under active development at MongoDB and will become the default storage engine for MongoDB 3.0.

"For those that want to adopt WiredTiger under 2.8, there is a no-downtime migration path. As for [MongoDB's current storage engine] MMAPv1, it will continue to see active development and support, even after WiredTiger becomes the default," he said.

"It will become one of a wide array of options made possible by our pluggable API, and for certain workloads, it will be the best choice."

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