MongoDB 1.8 released

The MongoDB developers have announced the release of version 1.8 of their open source, scalable, document-oriented database. Arriving just over seven months after the release of the previous stable major version, 1.6, this new release is a drop-in replacement for 1.6 and includes many new features. Most notably a journalling storage engine has been added, as well as support for covered and sparse indexes, together with bug fixes and other improvements.

The announcement indicates that journalling has been a high priority, as it has been "one of the most requested and discussed features within the MongoDB community"; the write-ahead journalling allows MongoDB instances to be quickly restarted after a crash by avoiding the need to repair the document collections. Sparse indexes will index only documents that contain a specified field while covered indexes allow queries to be answered using only the index if all the requested fields are in the index.

Other changes include improvements to Map/Reduce support to add incremental updating of collections, improved sharding performance, the addition of authentication to replica sets and spherical model for geo search. Details of all of these changes can be found in the change log.

MongoDB is available under the GNU AGPL3 with commercial licences available from 10gen. MongoDB drivers for Python, PHP, Ruby, Java and Perl are available under an Apache 2.0 licence. It is available to download from the Mongodb.org site as source or binaries for Linux, Solaris, Windows or Mac OS X.

See also:

• MongoDB 1.6 adds auto-sharding and replica sets, a report from The H.
• MongoDB 1.4 "Ready for Production", a report from The H.

(ehe)