Once I rejoined MongoDB in 2021, I acquired to listen to all of the outdated jokes rehashed. You realize, about MongoDB being “internet scale,” about dropping information, about solely being ultimately constant, and so forth. The online scale video is humorous; the opposite statements have largely been fallacious because the day they have been written. For instance, MongoDB has all the time been strongly constant. The contentions that had some semblance of reality have change into outdated with every MongoDB launch. As Senior Developer Advocate Mark Smith notes, “Every thing you recognize about MongoDB is fallacious.”
After all I’d say that. I work for MongoDB, in any case.
Even so, I feel it’s worthwhile to gut-check our assumptions. For instance, for years we have been informed that enterprises couldn’t substitute Oracle Database or SQL Server with PostgreSQL. For a lot of workloads, that’s merely not true at present and nearly actually wasn’t as “true” earlier than as some would have had us assume. Though PostgreSQL has all the time had a terrific group, it has additionally had a refrain of critics. In the meantime, each main cloud supplier has a PostgreSQL database service. Going additional, in 2021 AWS launched Babelfish, an open supply venture that makes it easy to drop in PostgreSQL to purposes written for SQL Server.
In like method, there’s a cause that each main cloud supplier presents MongoDB in some kind and that the database has been downloaded extra occasions prior to now 12 months than within the earlier 12 years mixed (for a grand complete of 265 million downloads so far). Each PostgreSQL and MongoDB have made dramatic good points in recognition relative to Oracle and SQL Server.
I don’t need to fanboy this text. However in the event you’ll indulge me, I’d like to catch you up on a MongoDB you may not know and end with a suggestion that simply may shock you: MongoDB now leads the {industry} in safety, given the discharge of Queryable Encryption.
Atomicity, transactions, and many others.
I left MongoDB in 2014, proper earlier than the corporate hit overdrive on updates to the core database. The corporate had all the time been a developer darling as a result of its comfort, however round this time MongoDB introduced the acquisition of WiredTiger, which paved the way in which for document-level concurrency management and compression, beginning in MongoDB 3.0 (WiredTiger as an choice) and evolving with MongoDB 3.2 (WiredTiger because the default).
A lot of the work of deeply integrating WiredTiger into MongoDB occurred in 2015, establishing a gentle drumbeat of database enhancements for the following few years, with one in all my absolute favorites—multi-document ACID transactions—arriving in MongoDB 4.0. As MongoDB cofounder Eliot Horowitz wryly wrote in 2018, “MongoDB drops ACID,” and the MongoDB world was by no means fairly the identical thereafter. In MongoDB 5.0, the corporate launched a versioned API that allowed builders to improve the database with out having to alter their utility, time sequence performance, a brand new serverless providing, stay resharding, and extra.
Most lately, at MongoDB World, the corporate introduced quite a few issues to make builders’ lives simpler: Atlas Information API, serverless situations, Atlas CLI, and extra. For me, the 2 most attention-grabbing thematic bulletins have been within the areas of analytics and safety. Oh, and open supply.
Analytics, in MongoDB’s world, are all about enabling builders to construct higher apps, not about information analysts doing offline evaluation. In at present’s world, the necessity for a real-time view of the enterprise pushes information evaluation and reporting wants nearer to the purposes that generate the information. MongoDB clearly acknowledged this rising want and introduced a number of new methods to make operating analytics towards operational information simple, together with a brand new SQL interface, Atlas Analytics Node Tiers, Atlas Information Federation, and Atlas Information Lake.
Even so, it strikes me that the corporate’s key announcement within the space of making use of analytics to real-time information was Columnstore Indexing. Since columnar codecs are perfect for operating analytical workloads, this indexing choice makes it simple for builders to maintain paperwork in the proper mannequin for his or her purposes with out shifting the information, and execute performant analytical queries towards that information in actual time for his or her purposes.
If all this comes as a shock to these within the “MongoDB is internet scale” camp, Queryable Encryption is a good greater shocker.
Upping the ante on information safety
Nothing that MongoDB (or any database firm) releases can be of a lot use if it couldn’t match options and performance with safety. MongoDB has lengthy supplied glorious safety, however the introduction of structured encryption for field-level encryption strikes issues to a different degree. Most databases have found out safe information at relaxation or in movement however fail to safe information whereas in use when it’s weak to insider entry and lively database breaches. Enter field-level encryption. Area-level encryption protects information in reminiscence and on disk on the server. It’s the very best degree of safety for breaches, however it has a draw back: It doesn’t permit for wealthy, expressive querying of encrypted information. Sure, you are able to do precise equality matches, however you must use deterministic encryption.
Good, however not almost sufficient.
Researchers have been engaged on this drawback since 2001, however this week MongoDB introduced the first-ever commercially obtainable, structured encryption mannequin, referred to as Queryable Encryption. With such structured encryption MongoDB can rework the encrypted area in a cryptographically safe manner such that it may retailer nameless metadata permitting expressive and environment friendly queries to be carried out. For instance, structured encryption permits a developer to construct a financial institution utility that may discover transactions utilizing a variety of dates or greenback quantities for fraud investigation.
That is best-in-industry stuff and doesn’t go away MongoDB’s developer group behind. In brief, MongoDB’s use of Queryable Encryption helps builders maintain their concentrate on constructing participating, data-driven purposes whereas assembly the {industry}’s most demanding information privateness challenges. No PhD in cryptography required.
This might be attention-grabbing in and of itself, however MongoDB took an particularly noteworthy angle with Queryable Encryption: It is going to be 100% open. As Porter declared in his keynote, “We shall be publishing the code, the algorithms, and the mathematics behind it as a result of we imagine in white-box safety, not black-box safety.”
This may occasionally come as a shock to those that nonetheless carp on MongoDB’s license change in 2019. (Builders don’t appear to thoughts, given greater priorities.) Nevertheless it shouldn’t. MongoDB is a contributor to Apache Lucene, releases WiredTiger underneath an open supply license, and in addition presents its Realm cell information retailer as open supply. It’s simple to color corporations in binary, however it’s often fallacious, as on this case.
All of it is a good distance of claiming that maybe it’s time to hit “refresh” in your views on MongoDB. No, it’s not going to be the proper information platform for your entire workloads. Nothing is. Nevertheless it’s good to make that call based mostly on present actuality, not outdated myths.
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