MongoDB adds scaling, compliance boosts to version 5.0 of its database platform

MongoDB today unveiled the 5.0 version of its general-purpose, document-oriented, NoSQL database platform. The latest updates support a broader range of workloads in serverless deployments, enable new ways to “future-proof” applications, and add privacy and security enhancements, the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a statement.

MongoDB announced the general availability of MongoDB 5.0 at its annual MongoDB.live developer conference, held virtually for the second year in a row.

The latest release is another step in Mongo’s transition to becoming a cloud-centric software company that both partners and competes with such platforms as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud, said MongoDB chief product officer Sahir Azam.

“MongoDB has evolved over the years to support modern apps and mission-critical databases for companies of all sizes, from small to disruptors to large enterprises. In the course of that journey, we’ve shifted and expanded our strategy to become a cloud data company,” he told VentureBeat.

“We wanted to hit some big themes with MongoDB 5.0. We wanted to add breadth of capability to the database, support the growth of IoT applications, enhance data security and privacy compliance capabilities, and boost ‘sharding’ for horizontal scaling because we are seeing more large-scale apps built on Mongo every day.”

Meeting the practical and regulatory needs of global apps

Sharding is a method of partitioning large databases into more easily manageable and better performing parts called “data shards.” MongoDB 5.0 adds live, seamless resharding, which lets users “change the shard key for collections on-demand as workloads grow and evolve, with no database downtime for complex migrations,” Azam said.

“We use a distributed architecture so you can linearly scale forever. Where Mongo has taken the idea of partitioning, or sharding, further than anyone else is in giving much more control to customers as to how they want to do it, which is crucial to how you manage a global application with different requirements — practical and regulatory — depending where it is being used,” he added.

“So in finance, we may want data to sit very close geographically to where an application is using it. This also helps with data sovereignty compliance — sharding allows you to tag that data by policy so the data can reside in the region or country where the law requires it to reside.”

Per MongoDB, other new features in the latest release include:

• Native Time Series collections, clustered indexing, and window functions make it easier, faster, and lower cost to build and run applications like IoT and financial analytics, and to enrich enterprise data with time series measurements.
• Developers can now future-proof their applications with the Versioned API. The application lifecycle can be decoupled from the database lifecycle, providing a level of investment protection that is ahead of other databases. Developers can have confidence that their application code will continue to run unchanged for years, without interruption, even as the database is upgraded and improved beneath it.
• MongoDB’s unique Client-Side Field Level Encryption (FLE) now brings some of the strongest data privacy controls to multi-cloud clusters. Backed by always-on auditing and certificate rotation, MongoDB 5.0 helps users maintain a strict security posture with no interruption to applications, and with the freedom to run applications anywhere.

MongoDB is available in three editions: the free MongoDB Community Server edition for Windows, Linux, and OS X; the MongoDB Enterprise Server commercial edition, available by paid subscription; and MongoDB Atlas, an on-demand, fully managed cloud service running on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform that is can be deployed across multiple and hybrid cloud settings.