MongoDB has announced version 3.0 of its open-source NoSQL database, calling it a “landmark release” in terms of performance, flexibility, management capabilities and operating cost.

MongoDB cofounder and CTO Eliot Horowitz announced MongoDB 3.0 in a blog post, detailing the new WiredTiger storage engine and enhancements to the original storage engine; a revamped production architecture and pluggable storage engine API; and a new on-premise Ops Manager.

“Taken as a whole, the changes in 3.0 remove bottlenecks and obviate workarounds, suiting MongoDB to an even wider variety of applications, and providing teams the confidence to run it in more mission-critical situations,” Horowitz wrote. “MongoDB 3.0 is a true contender for the title of ‘default database’ in any organization.”

Here is a closer look at the new features and improvements coming in MongoDB 3.0:

  • WiredTiger storage engine: Built with latch-free, non-blocking algorithms, WiredTiger introduces document-level concurrency control and transparent on-disk compression that Horowitz claimed reduces storage requirements by up to 80%.
  • MMAPv1 default storage engine: Original storage engine for binary workload drops, enhanced with collection-level concurrency control and more-efficient journaling.
  • MongoDB Management Service: A flexible production infrastructure in MongoDB 3.0 mixing both MMAPv1 and WiredTiger to provide a high-level layer of application development and horizontal scale, tailoring storage capacity to specific use cases.
  • Storage engine API: A pluggable API that allows MongoDB to integrate into in-memory, encrypted, HDFS, hardware-optimized or other environments. According to Horowitz, “MongoDB can now be used as a laboratory for storage engine development,” allowing storage engine developers to let “a massive installation base of MongoDB users take the new engine for a spin just by adding a replica set member.”
  • Ops Manager: An on-premise enterprise product simplifying management tasks to push-button usability, supporting existing automation and provisioning tools with an Ops Manager API to integrate existing monitoring, backup and management tools.

In addition to the above additions to MongoDB 3.0, Horowitz stated the company is also developing more advanced WiredTiger surface features such as Log Structured Merge Trees, iterating on Ops Manager, and working to implement a transaction system for the distributed document model.

MongoDB 3.0 will be generally available in March, and the latest MongoDB production release candidate, MongoDB 2.6.7, can be found here.