10gen Releases MongoDB 2.4

MongoDB company 10gen has announced the general availability of the MongoDB 2.4 document database. New capabilities include Hash-based Sharding, Capped Arrays, Text Search, and Geospatial Enhancements.

NOTE: Codefutures.com defines database sharding as, "A 'shared-nothing' partitioning scheme for large databases across a number of servers, enabling new levels of database performance and scalability.

MongoDB provides horizontal scaling by transparently sharding data across multiple physical servers and MongoDB 2.4 now includes Hash-based Sharding, a new option that simplifies the creation of large-scale MongoDB systems.

10gen has also introduced MongoDB Enterprise as part of a new MongoDB Enterprise subscription level to bring new monitoring and security features forward including Kerberos authentication and role-based Privileges.

NOTE: Microsoft's TechNet defines the Kerberos version 5 authentication protocol as a means to, "Provide a mechanism for authentication — and mutual authentication — between a client and a server, or between one server and another server."

The Mongo developer teams explains that applications frequently provide real-time visibility into top-ranking attributes, such as leaderboards and most viewed, emailed, or purchased items — so a new Capped Arrays functionality allows developers to maintain a sorted array of fixed length within documents.

Also here is MongoDB's native, real-time Text Search to simplify development and deployment for MongoDB users with stemming and tokenization in 15 languages.

Eliot Horowitz, cofounder and CTO of 10gen, explained that MongoDB 2.4 introduces GeoJSON support, a more accurate spherical model and polygon intersections.

"MongoDB is used in applications where real-time, low-latency performance is critical. The Working Set Analyzer helps users maximize their performance and their capacity planning based on analysis of resource utilization. MongoDB 2.4 intelligently determines when to initiate the election of a new primary replica during network hiccups. Replication is now significantly faster for initial synchronization, providing greater flexibility and lower risk for maintaining system availability," said Horowitz.

Finally, count operation performance has improved, including low cardinality index-based counts that are 20x faster than prior releases of MongoDB. Performance for real-time analysis of data using MongoDB's Aggregation Framework is now also 3-5x faster for most operations.