- MongoDB launches Atlas Data Lake: query S3 buckets with MQL
- New mobile database vision with Realm Sync
- Fresh distributed transactions, encryption, k8s features in v4.2
New York’s MongoDB may not yet be a household name in the UK – a roundly unscientific spot poll suggests there’s room for improvement – but with a customer roster including Barclays, Cisco, Google, HMRC and SAP, the company is punching comfortably above the weight that its popular name recognition would suggest.
With the non-relational database provider’s share price up five-fold since its 2017 IPO, and a customer roster that had grown to 14,200 from 5,700 at the start of calendar 2018, investors and users are voting with their feet. The market: both greenfield deployments, and customers that are shifting off “traditional” relational databases like those of Oracle (migrations are now up to 30 percent of company business).
Demand is being driven by the need to manage an avalanche of rapidly changing data types including “polymorphic” data generated by new classes of web, mobile, social, and IoT apps. (Making use of that data via a relational databases in today’s world is increasingly challenging, amid an industry-wide push for higher developer productivity and faster time to market for applications – as waterfall development gives way to agile methodologies, microservices, and DevOps – and release cycles get ever shorter.)
With public cloud providers muscling into MongoDB’s space (AWS launched a fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads in January) the company is under pressure to keep enhancing its offering. At its MongoDB World event in New York this week, the company set about doing just that; taking the fight right back to AWS (and privately held data lake specialist Snowflake) as it did so, with a new S3-centric data lake offering dubbed Atlas Data Lake, and a host of other new features.
Enter Atlas Data Lake
MongoDB Atlas Data Lake allows customers to quickly query data on Amazon S3 buckets in any format, including JSON, BSON, CSV, TSV, Parquet and Avro, using the MongoDB Query Language (MQL), without having to set up any infrastructure. (Atlas Data Lake is serverless. It can be set up and queried from the MongoDB Atlas console), effectively turning customers’ S3 storage into a highly useable data lake.
(AWS has its own ideas about this of course, promoting the use of S3 with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon Rekognition, and AWS Glue to query and process data, with AWS Lambda serverless to run code without provisioning servers.)
Available now as a beta on AWS, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Storage options are planned as well. (Computer Business Review is confirming the envisioned delivery dates for both).
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Full-Text Search
Another new feature announced today, Full-Text Search, gives end-users the flexibility to filter, rank and sort through their data to quickly surface the most relevant results, without having to pair their database with an external search engine.
“Our new offerings radically expand the ways developers can use MongoDB to better work with data,” said Dev Ittycheria, CEO and President, MongoDB.
“We strive to help developers be more productive and remove infrastructure headaches – with additional features along with adjunct capabilities like full-text search and data lake. IDC predicts that by 2025 global data will reach 175 Zettabytes and 49 percent of it will reside in the public cloud. It’s our mission to give developers better ways to work with data wherever it resides, including in public and private clouds.”
Also New: Data Visualisation, Fresh Goodies in MongoDB 4.2
Also hot off the press, a new data visualisation tool (MongoDB Charts) and a trio of standout new features in the latest version of its core database, MongoDB 4.2: distributed transactions, field level encryption and a fresh Kubernetes Operator.
For the latter, users can manage their MongoDB deployment from a single Kubernetes control plane. On self-managed infrastructure – whether on-premises or in the cloud – Kubernetes users can use the MongoDB Enterprise Operator for Kubernetes and MongoDB Ops Manager to automate and manage MongoDB clusters.
Developers can use the operator with upstream Kubernetes, or with distributions such as Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal Container Service (PKS). (Details on MongoDB field level encryption; distributed transactions to follow separately.)
The company also revealed its product vision for Realm, a company it acquired in May. It will merge the mobile database and synchronization platform with the serverless platform MongoDB Stitch under the Realm brand. Realm’s synchronisation protocol will connect with the MongoDB Atlas global cloud database on the backend. This “Realm Sync” will let developers connect data to the devices running their applications.
MongoDB;s vision: a future in which Realm is the default database for mobile developers and the favoured way to build real-time data applications in the browser.
