Once I rejoined MongoDB in 2021, I received to listen to all of the previous jokes rehashed. You realize, about MongoDB being “internet scale,” about dropping knowledge, about solely being finally constant, and so forth. The online scale video is humorous; the opposite statements have largely been flawed because the day they have been written. For instance, MongoDB has at all times been strongly constant. The contentions that had some semblance of reality have turn into outdated with every MongoDB launch. As Senior Developer Advocate Mark Smith notes, “Every part about MongoDB is flawed.”
In fact I’d say that. I work for MongoDB, in any case.
Even so, I believe 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 immediately and nearly actually wasn’t as “true” earlier than as some would have had us suppose. Though PostgreSQL has at all times had an amazing neighborhood, 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 mission that makes it easy to drop in PostgreSQL to functions written for SQL Server.
In like method, there’s a purpose that each main cloud supplier gives MongoDB in some type and that the database has been downloaded extra instances up to now 12 months than within the earlier 12 years mixed (for a grand whole of 265 million downloads thus far). Each PostgreSQL and MongoDB have made dramatic positive aspects in reputation relative to Oracle and SQL Server.
I don’t need to fanboy this text. However if you happen to’ll indulge me, I’d like to catch you up on a MongoDB you may not know and end with a suggestion that simply would possibly shock you: MongoDB now leads the {industry} in safety, given the discharge of Queryable Encryption.
Atomicity, transactions, and so on.
I left MongoDB in 2014, proper earlier than the corporate hit overdrive on updates to the core database. The corporate had at all times been a developer darling because 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, organising a gentle drumbeat of database enhancements for the following few years, with one in every of 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 vary their utility, time sequence performance, a brand new serverless providing, stay resharding, and extra.
Most just lately, at MongoDB World, the corporate introduced a lot of issues to make builders’ lives simpler: Atlas Knowledge API, serverless cases, 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 knowledge analysts doing offline evaluation. In immediately’s world, the necessity for a real-time view of the enterprise pushes knowledge evaluation and reporting wants nearer to the functions that generate the info. MongoDB clearly acknowledged this rising want and introduced a number of new methods to make working analytics in opposition to operational knowledge straightforward, together with a brand new SQL interface, Atlas Analytics Node Tiers, Atlas Knowledge Federation, and Atlas Knowledge Lake.
Even so, it strikes me that the corporate’s key announcement within the space of making use of analytics to real-time knowledge was Columnstore Indexing. Since columnar codecs are perfect for working analytical workloads, this indexing choice makes it straightforward for builders to maintain paperwork in the appropriate mannequin for his or her functions with out transferring the info, and execute performant analytical queries in opposition to that knowledge in actual time for his or her functions.
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 knowledge 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 how one can safe knowledge at relaxation or in movement however fail to safe knowledge whereas in use when it’s weak to insider entry and lively database breaches. Enter field-level encryption. Area-level encryption protects knowledge in reminiscence and on disk on the server. It’s the best degree of safety for breaches, nevertheless it has a draw back: It doesn’t permit for wealthy, expressive querying of encrypted knowledge. Sure, you are able to do precise equality matches, however it’s important to 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 accessible, structured encryption mannequin, known as Queryable Encryption. With such structured encryption MongoDB can rework the encrypted area in a cryptographically safe method such that it could retailer nameless metadata permitting expressive and environment friendly queries to be carried out. For example, 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 neighborhood behind. Briefly, MongoDB’s use of Queryable Encryption helps builders preserve their concentrate on constructing partaking, data-driven functions whereas assembly the {industry}’s most demanding knowledge privateness challenges. No PhD in cryptography required.
This may 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 maths behind it as a result of we consider in white-box safety, not black-box safety.”
This will likely come as a shock to those that nonetheless carp on MongoDB’s license change in 2019. (Builders don’t appear to thoughts, given increased priorities.) Nevertheless it shouldn’t. MongoDB is a contributor to Apache Lucene, releases WiredTiger below an open supply license, and likewise gives its Realm cellular knowledge retailer as open supply. It’s straightforward to color corporations in binary, nevertheless it’s often flawed, 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 appropriate knowledge platform for all your workloads. Nothing is. Nevertheless it’s good to make that call based mostly on present actuality, not outdated myths.
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