MongoDB World 2022 Announcements Roundup

This year’s MongoDB World conference saw the usual wide range of announcements, covering the broad sweep of the company’s offerings. Studio 3T is here for you, extracting the important information from a packed session of product reveals.

Leading the keynote was Atlas Serverless, MongoDB’s multi-cloud pay-per-use database offering. This has now gone GA (Generally Available) offering on-demand rapid scale-up and scaling to zero as required.

Also going GA is Atlas Data API, a serverless, connectionless HTTPS API for applications which do not talk MongoDB protocols. Announced and GA’d at the same time was Atlas CLI, a command-line alternative to the Atlas web interface.

Also revealed at MongoDB World was Queryable Encryption. This is a new technique that allows querying of end to end encrypted data, in place without being decryption. In a Wired article, the creators say that they aimed to deliver this while remaining “really, really fast”. The Queryable Encryption technology is getting an open source release and is currently under audit by cryptographic experts. 

MongoDB Announcements Served

MongoDB 6.0 is in the last leg before GA, as a release candidate. The release notes for the release candidate show the various new features. In Aggregation new operators offer as top and bottom slicing of groups and sorting arrays as a single operation. There is also support for clustered collections and indexes, and improved change streams. 

What seems to be most impressive is the new slot-based query engine which has been available since MongoDB 5.1. This is a new approach to handling queries which helps to parallelize a query over multiple virtual CPUs. In MongoDB 6.0, this is able to handle a range of $group and $lookup operations. 

Where data already has indexes and there are a lot of matches, MongoDB claims a 2x improvement in $lookup performance. If there are fewer matches, they suggest a 5-10x performance improvement. If there are no indexes available, then a 100x performance boost is obtainable with the new engine, according to the presentations. The $lookup and $graphLookup operators can also, with 6.0, work with sharded collections.

Also new, only with MongoDB 6.0, is a preview of a new Cluster to Cluster sync tool. This enables independent clusters to synchronize data in one direction. It opens the way to new database services topologies such as devops staging configurations.

Atlas Enhanced

MongoDB also announced plans to release new Atlas services. These include Atlas Data Federation and improved Atlas Data Lake. The Data Lake now comes with its own integrated storage and pipelines connected to Atlas databases. An Atlas SQL Interface with connectors for applications such as Tableau is also being released. To enable more powerful analysis, MongoDB announced new Analytics nodes. These nodes can scale independently of the clusters they are attached to, to match analytics workloads.

Realm Expanded

MongoDB’s mobile offering, Realm, saw updates in its integration with Atlas. MongoDB announced GA for MongoDB Atlas Device Sync’s Flexible Sync option which synchronizes Atlas databases with the Realm mobile platform. It also announced a new Asymmetric Sync option for write-heavy workloads. Developers will find new language support for Kotlin (GA) and Flutter(Beta) among others is now available.

And that’s our round up of the MongoDB World 2022 Announcements. If you are at MongoDB World, don’t forget to meet Studio 3T on the Partners Promenade, where we’re showing the latest in MongoDB tooling with our battle-tested SQL Query and Migration tooling.