Top 4 Reasons to Use MongoDB 8.0

Scott Amerman and Cristopher Stauffer
October 2, 2024 | Updated: November 4, 2024
#MongoDB 8.0

This post is also available in: Deutsch, Français, Español, Português, Italiano, 한국어, 简体中文.

We’re excited to announce that MongoDB 8.0—the newest version of the world’s most popular document database, used by millions of developers and more than 50,000 customers around the world—is now generally available. MongoDB 8.0 builds upon MongoDB’s industry-leading capabilities to provide significant performance improvements, reduced costs, and greater ease of use, from local deployments to globally distributed applications at enterprise scale.

””

Developers have long loved building with MongoDB, so we've ensured that 8.0 kept the bar extremely high for developer usability. MongoDB 8.0 was also built to exceed our customers’ most stringent security, resiliency, availability, and performance requirements, and is the most impressive version of MongoDB yet. MongoDB 8.0 gives customers the strongest possible foundation for building a wide range of applications, now and in the future.

Jim Scharf, Chief Technology Officer, MongoDB

For MongoDB 8.0, we focused our engineering efforts around four core goals:

  • Optimize performance for the widest variety of applications

  • Deliver innovative encryption to unlock new use cases

  • Reduce costs and increase scale with rapid and intuitive horizontal scaling for high availability

  • Ensure resilience for unexpected application demand

So how do these goals actually benefit teams as they build and manage applications? We’ll start by looking at why you should use MongoDB 8.0.

Whether you’re a seasoned MongoDB veteran or are new to the database, MongoDB 8.0 is a great foundation for new applications and supercharging existing ones alike. Version 8.0 combines the things developers love most about MongoDB—like an intuitive and cohesive developer experience, support for a broad set of use cases, and operational ease of use—with unparalleled performance improvements.

Top reasons to switch to MongoDB 8.0

1. MongoDB 8.0 is over 30% faster than before

As the data applications generate and use grows, minor inefficiencies can lead to disproportionate increases in infrastructure costs. Because many customers primarily interact with businesses through their applications, poor or inconsistent application performance can lead to customer unhappiness, lost opportunities, and declines in revenue. So it’s imperative for organizations to ensure that their applications perform consistently well.

MongoDB 8.0 significantly improves performance by allowing applications to rapidly and efficiently query and transform data, with up to 36% better throughput. Architectural optimizations in MongoDB 8.0 have reduced memory usage and query times, and a combination of more efficient batch processing and optimizations has enabled 59% higher throughput for updates and 20% faster concurrent writes during data replication. Additionally, optimizations in MongoDB 8.0 mean the database can handle higher volumes of time series data and perform operations over 200% faster—with lower resource usage and costs.

2. MongoDB 8.0 is more secure than ever

Data protection and security are essential. With the increasing complexity and volume of data being transmitted, stored, and processed across environments, safeguarding sensitive information with robust encryption is more critical than ever. 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 Queryable Encryption is an industry-first innovation developed by the MongoDB Cryptography Research Group. It allows customers to encrypt sensitive data on the client side, store it securely as fully randomized encrypted data in the MongoDB database, and to run expressive queries on the encrypted data for processing.

MongoDB 8.0 now includes support for range queries—in addition to equality queries—to expand secure data retrieval with greater flexibility for common searches. With Queryable Encryption, the required data remains encrypted until it reaches an authorized end user using a customer-controlled decryption key—with no cryptography expertise required.

3. MongoDB 8.0 makes it cheaper and easier to scale

As organizations grow, their applications’ requirements tend to evolve. For example, scaling to support millions of users can be challenging for organizations that originally designed their applications for thousands of users. This is because implementing architectural changes in production applications can involve significant effort that can be costly and time-consuming.

With MongoDB 8.0, horizontal scaling is now faster and easier, and at a lower cost. With horizontal scaling, applications can scale beyond the limits of traditional database resources by splitting data across multiple servers known as shards—without having to pre-provision increasing amounts of compute resources for a single server. New sharding capabilities in MongoDB 8.0 distribute data across shards up to 50 times faster and at up to 50% lower cost to get started.

4. MongoDB 8.0 gives you more control to help your applications run smoothly

End-users expect consistent application experiences, even during periods of high demand and usage spikes. Organizations without a highly durable operational database risk poor customer experiences, with lagging application behavior (or even downtime) during times of high demand.

MongoDB 8.0 provides greater control for teams optimizing database performance for unpredictable spikes in usage and sustained periods of high demand. MongoDB 8.0 includes new capabilities to set a default maximum time limit for running queries, to reject recurring types of problematic queries, and to set query settings to persist through events like database restarts. These capabilities help deliver consistent application behavior and high performance, irrespective of demand spikes or unexpected events.

Ready to try MongoDB 8.0?

If you are building a new application, the easiest way to get started with MongoDB 8.0 is by going to mongodb.com/try, where you can sign up for a free Atlas account, download the Community edition, and learn more about self-managing MongoDB with an Enterprise Advanced subscription.

If you are running a previous version of MongoDB, there are helpful upgrade tutorials for MongoDB Atlas and self-managed deployments. Additionally, documentation and expert help from the MongoDB professional services team are on hand.

If you have an existing application that is not currently using MongoDB as the database, check out the MongoDB Relational Migrator tool. Relational Migrator can help you map existing relational schemas to a MongoDB schema, perform data migrations, and convert existing relational queries, triggers, and stored procedures to work with MongoDB.

The MongoDB engineering and product teams listened attentively to developer feedback, and MongoDB 8.0 was built with developer usability—as well as security, durability, availability, and performance—top of mind. We’re excited for you to give it a try, and are sure you’ll enjoy the performance gains and other benefits of MongoDB 8.0!

← Previous

MongoDB 8.0: Raising the Bar

I recently received an automated reminder that I was approaching a work anniversary, which took me somewhat by surprise. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a year (to the day) that I joined MongoDB ! So I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on my MongoDB journey so far, share some exciting product updates, and signal where we’re headed next. Our customers I joined MongoDB because it built a product developers love. The innovation of MongoDB’s document model empowered developers to simply build. No longer encumbered by having to formalize and denormalize their data schema before their application was even designed, MongoDB enabled developers to interact with data in an intuitive JSON format, and made it easy to evolve data structures as the life of their application evolved. One of my first steps upon joining the company was to learn more about our customers. I was excited to learn that in addition to delighting developers, MongoDB had launched capabilities that enabled it to win mission-critical workloads from enterprise class customers—including 70% of the Fortune 100 and highly regulated global financial institutions, health care providers, and government agencies. I found it remarkable that customers could replicate data across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure in MongoDB Atlas (our fully-managed cloud database service) with just a few mouse clicks, and that some customers replicate data between the cloud and on premises using MongoDB Enterprise Advanced. This optionality struck me as powerful in the era of rapid advancements in AI, as it enables customers to easily bring their data to the best cloud provider for AI. Soon after I joined MongoDB, the team was firming up the development roadmap for the next version of MongoDB, and they asked for my input on the plan. The team was debating whether to focus on features developers would love, or governance capabilities required by large enterprises. I knew that ideally we would please all of our customers, so we had to try to make this an “and” and not an “or.” While I was new to MongoDB, from my 17+ years at AWS I learned that all customers demand security, durability, availability, and performance (in that order) from any modern technology offering. If a product or service doesn’t have those four elements, customers won’t buy whatever you’re selling. So as a team, we agreed that our next release of MongoDB—MongoDB 8.0—had to raise the bar for all of our customers, delivering great security, durability, availability, and performance. The plan We had less than a year before our target launch, so we knew we had to get moving, fast. My team and I brought MongoDB’s product and engineering organizations together to align on the plan for our next release. We set goals around delivering significant improvements in security, durability, and availability. And we set a line in the sand—that we weren’t going to release MongoDB 8.0 unless it was the best-performing version of MongoDB yet. Measuring the performance of a feature-rich database like MongoDB can be tricky, as customers run a wide range of workloads. So we decided to run a suite of benchmarks to simulate customer workloads. We also developed Andon cord -inspired automation that would automatically roll back any code contributions that regressed our performance metrics. Finally, a set of senior engineering leaders met regularly to review our progress and immediately escalated any blockers that could jeopardize our launch, so that we could quickly fix things. From my experience, I knew that great teams really respond when they’re given clear goals, and when they’re empowered to innovate, so I was excited to see what they would come up with. I’m proud to say that our product and engineering teams rose to the challenge. Announcing MongoDB 8.0 Today, I’m thrilled to announce the general availability of MongoDB 8.0 —the most secure, durable, available, and performant version of MongoDB yet! 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. Specifically, MongoDB 8.0 features: 36% better read throughput 56% faster bulk writes 20% faster concurrent writes during data replication 200% faster on complex aggregations of times series data In making these improvements, we're seeing benchmarks for typical web applications perform 32% better overall. Here’s a breakdown of how MongoDB 8.0 performs against some of our benchmarks: Improved performance benefits all users of applications built atop MongoDB, and for MongoDB customers, it can mean reduced costs (due to an improved price/performance ratio). In addition to significant performance gains, MongoDB 8.0 delivers a wide range of improvements, including (but not limited to): Improving availability by delivering sharding enhancements to distribute data across shards up to 50 times faster and at up to 50% lower starting cost, with reduced need for additional configuration or setup. Improving support for a wide range of search and AI applications at higher scale and lower cost, via the delivery of quantized vectors—compressed representations of full-fidelity vectors—that require up to 96% less memory and are faster to retrieve while preserving accuracy. Enabling customers to encrypt data at rest, in transit, and in use by expanding MongoDB’s Queryable Encryption to also support range queries. Queryable Encryption is a groundbreaking, industry-first innovation developed by the MongoDB Cryptography Research Group that allows customers to encrypt sensitive application data, store it securely as fully randomized encrypted data in the MongoDB database, and run expressive queries on the encrypted data —with no cryptography expertise required. You might wonder why we’re so confident that customers are going to love MongoDB 8.0. Well, we’ve been acting as our own customer, and have moved our own applications over to 8.0. This approach is generally called “ dogfooding ,” but we think that “eating our own pizza” sounds more appetizing. 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%! This was a double win, as it improved the performance of our own tooling, and it set our performance chat room abuzz with excitement in anticipation of delighting external customers. While results may vary based on your particular workload, the point is that we just couldn’t wait to share MongoDB 8.0’s performance gains with customers. Indeed, customers are also already seeing great results on MongoDB 8.0. For example, Felix Horvat, Chief Technology Officer at OCELL , a climate technology company in Germany, said: “With MongoDB 8.0, we have seen an incredible boost in performance, with some of our queries running twice as fast as before . This improvement not only enhances our data processing capabilities but also aligns perfectly with our commitment to resource efficiency. By optimizing our backend operations, we can be more effective in our climate initiatives while conserving resources—a true reflection of our dedication to sustainable solutions.” I encourage you to check out MongoDB 8.0 yourself. It’s available today via MongoDB Atlas, as part of MongoDB Enterprise Advanced for on-premises and hybrid deployments, and as a free download from mongodb.com/try with MongoDB Community Edition. In addition, customers upgrading from previous versions of MongoDB to 8.0 can find helpful upgrade guides on mongodb.com. What’s next? We’re excited for you to try MongoDB 8.0 and to share your feedback, as customer feedback helps us guide our roadmap for future releases. Going forward, please watch this space. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of engineering blog posts that dig into MongoDB’s investments in the technology behind MongoDB 8.0. We’re also planning posts about horizontal scaling in MongoDB 8.0, and one that will look closely at queryable encryption (QE), but let me know what you’d like to hear more about. It’s been an exciting year at MongoDB—I can’t wait to see what the next one has in store! –Jim

October 2, 2024
Next →

MongoDB Database Observability: Integrating with Monitoring Tools

This post is the final in a three-part series on leveraging database observability. Welcome back to our series on Leveraging Database Observability! Our previous post showcased a real-world use case highlighting how MongoDB Atlas’s observability tools effectively tackle database performance challenges. Whether you’re a developer, DBA, or DevOps engineer, our mission is to empower you to harness the full potential of your data through our observability suite . Integrating Atlas metrics with your central enterprise observability tools can simplify your operations. By seamlessly working with popular observability tools, our approach helps teams streamline workflows and enhance visibility across systems. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with third-party monitoring tools MongoDB’s developer data platform combines all essential data services for building modern applications within a unified experience. Our purpose-built observability tools for Atlas environments offer automatic monitoring and optimization, guiding diagnostics tailored specifically for MongoDB. Additionally, we extend Atlas metrics into your existing enterprise observability stack, enabling seamless integration without replacing your current tools. This creates a consolidated, single-pane view that unifies Atlas telemetry with other tech and application metrics, ensuring comprehensive visibility into both database and full-stack performance. This integration empowers you to monitor, receive alerts, and make data-driven decisions within your existing workflows, driving greater efficiency. Below is a quick guide to modifying integration settings through the Atlas UI and the popular integrations we support: Navigate to the Project Integrations page in Atlas. Choose the organization and project you want to configure from the navigation bar. On the Project Integrations page, select the third-party services you’d like to integrate. Configure the chosen services with the required API keys and regions. Critical integrations for your observability platform With Atlas’s Datadog and Prometheus integrations, you can send critical MongoDB metrics to these platforms, empowering detailed, real-time monitoring. Through Datadog , you can track database operation counts, query efficiency, and resource usage, ideal for pinpointing bottlenecks and managing resources. Similarly, Prometheus enables you to monitor essential metrics like query times, connection rates, and memory usage, supporting flexible tracking of database health and performance. Both integrations facilitate proactive detection of issues, alert configuration for resource thresholds, and a cohesive view of Atlas data when visualized in Grafana. Atlas’s integration with PagerDuty streamlines incident management by sending metrics like performance alerts, billing anomalies, and security events directly to PagerDuty. This integration records incidents automatically, notifies teams upon alerts, and supports two-way syncing, ensuring resolved alerts in Atlas are reflected in PagerDuty. It enables efficient incident response and resource allocation to maintain system stability. With Atlas integrations for Microsoft Teams and Slack, you can route key metrics—such as query latency, disk usage, and throughput—to these channels for timely updates. Teams can use these insights for real-time performance monitoring, incident response, and collaboration. Notifications through these platforms ensure your team stays informed on database performance, storage health, and user activity changes as they occur. Use case: Centralized observability with MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack Let’s walk through a hypothetical scenario for ShopSmart, an e-commerce company that leverages MongoDB Atlas to manage its product catalog and customer data. As traffic surges, the DevOps team faces challenges in monitoring application performance and database health effectively. To tackle these challenges, the team leverages MongoDB Atlas’ integration with Datadog and Slack, creating a powerful observability ecosystem. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with Datadog: The team pushes key MongoDB Atlas metrics into Datadog, such as query performance, connection counts, and Atlas Vector Search metrics. With Datadog, they can visualize these metrics and correlate overall MongoDB performance with their other applications. Out-of-the-box monitors and dedicated dashboards allow the team to track metrics like throughput, average read/write latency, and current connections. This visibility helps pinpoint bottlenecks in real time, ensuring optimal database performance and improving overall application responsiveness. Setting up alerts in Datadog: The team configures alerts for critical metrics like high query latency and increased error rates. When thresholds are breached, Datadog instantly notifies the team. This proactive approach allows the team to address potential performance issues before they impact customers. Integrating Datadog with Slack: To ensure fast communication, alerts are sent directly to the dedicated Slack channel, “ShopSmart-Alerts.” This integration fosters seamless collaboration, enabling the team to discuss and resolve issues in real-time. With these integrations, ShopSmart’s engineering team can monitor performance quickly and address issues efficiently. The unified observability approach enhances operational efficiency, improves the customer experience, and supports ShopSmart’s competitive edge in the e-commerce industry. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack, the team ensures scalable performance and drives continuous innovation. Conclusion MongoDB Atlas empowers developers and organizations to achieve unparalleled observability and control over their database environments. By seamlessly integrating with central enterprise observability tools, Atlas enhances your ability to monitor performance metrics and ensures you can do so within your existing workflows. This means you can focus on building modern applications confidently, knowing you have the insights and alerts necessary to maintain optimal performance. Embrace the power of MongoDB Atlas and transform your approach to database management—because your applications can thrive when your data is observable. And that wraps up our Leveraging Database Observability series! We hope you learned something new and found value in these discussions. Sign up for MongoDB Atlas , our cloud database service, to see database observability in action. To dive deeper and expand your knowledge, check out this learning byte for more insights on the MongoDB observability suite and how it can enhance your database performance.

November 14, 2024