MongoDB has announced the general availability of MongoDB 8.0, introducing significant performance enhancements and new features. Highlights include embedded sharding configuration servers, expanded support for queryable encryption, and the capability to move collections across shards without requiring a shard key.
According to MongoDB, the latest version of the popular NoSQL database offers faster resharding, up to 36% faster reads, and up to 56% faster bulk inserts. Jim Scharf, CTO at MongoDB, explains how the team achieved faster concurrent writes during data replication and enhanced the speed of complex aggregations of times series data. Sharf states:
The team came up with architectural optimizations in MongoDB 8.0 that have significantly reduced memory usage and query times, and have made batch processing more efficient than previous versions.
According to Scharf, running various benchmarks for typical web applications using the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB), an open-source specification and program suite, shows a 32% overall performance improvement with MongoDB 8.0. Scharf adds:
Our internal build system—which our software developers use daily—is built atop MongoDB, and when we upgraded to MongoDB 8.0 we saw query latencies drop by approximately 75%.
Source: MongoDB blog
Not everyone is convinced by the performance improvements. Pointing to performance drops in previous versions, Vinicius Malvestio Grippa, Lead Database Engineer at Percona, comments:
This is good news, but let’s not get too excited just yet. Given that MongoDB 7.0 didn’t exactly break any speed records, I’d love to see how it stacks up against MongoDB 6.0 and 5.0 (yes, I know 5.0’s EOL is right around the corner). There is a certain trend when it comes to databases: with newer versions, you get more features and lose performance (MySQL is the same).
Another area of improvement is security, with new authentication options, standardized security logs, and enhanced features for querying encrypted data. The Queryable Encryption feature allows developers to encrypt data on the client side, store it as encrypted data in the MongoDB database, and run queries on the data for processing on this encrypted data. Scott Amerman, product marketing leader at MongoDB, and Cristopher Stauffer, senior director of product management at MongoDB, write:
Organizations must protect their data throughout its lifecycle—in transit over networks, at rest where it is stored, and while it’s in use for querying and processing. However, it can be challenging to encrypt data while it is queried and processed, leaving data vulnerable to exposure or exfiltration by malicious actors.
MongoDB enhances availability with easier horizontal scaling and sharding improvements that enable faster data distribution across shards with reduced configuration and setup. The new version has been well received by the community, with Jerwin Roy, lead database administrator at Arab Bank, commenting:
Mongodb 8.0 is out with noticeable improvement in performance, time to play around. My favorite is the aggregation improvement and embedded config server on cost reduction.
The latest version of MongoDB is released under the SSPL license and can be deployed using MongoDB Atlas, on-premises, or in cloud environments.