In the News

10gen, the MongoDB company, has released MongoDB 2.4, featuring hashed-based sharding, capped arrays, text search, and geospatial enhancements. 10gen has also introduced MongoDB Enterprise as part of a new MongoDB Enterprise subscription level, featuring new monitoring and security features including Kerberos Authentication and role-based privileges.

Hashed-based sharding in the MongoDB 2.4 release provides horizontal scaling by transparently sharding data across multiple physical servers. “You’re effectively guaranteeing an even distribution of writes and reads across the shards and making that possible without knowing a whole lot about your data or queries up front,” Kelly Stirman, director of product marketing at 10gen, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Capped arrays simplify development by automatically maintaining a sorted array of fixed length within documents. In addition, native, real-time text search simplifies development and deployment for MongoDB users with stemming and tokenization in 15 languages. “It has the basics of search; it doesn’t have all the features of Solr Lucene or Elastic Search, but for a lot of applications it is good enough,” Stirman explains.

10gen, the company behind the popular open source MongoDB database, is about to move out of its maxed-out startup headquarters in Manhattan's trendy SoHo neighborhood and into spacious, newly renovated offices just off of Times Square in midtown.

The move is a perfect metaphor for a 10gen/MongoDB move upscale. With the database gaining adoption among (and features aimed at) large and midsize corporations, the company is moving uptown (literally and figuratively) into more of a corporate neighborhood. With the release of MongoDB 2.4, announced Tuesday, the company also is introducing a commercial software edition that should help pay those pricey midtown rents.

As Big Data’s influence continues to show in the datacenter, the platforms making things smarter at every level of the stack grow in distinction and support. In another play for the enterprise, 10gen launched new versions of its flagship NoSQL database and its commercial offering. MongoDB Enterprise brings several new features to the toolbox, wooing corporate clients. One key update is the search component, a high-demand feature for the enterprise as it looks for usable Big Data installations. Sweetening the pot, 10gen’s also added fresh analytics features and broader reporting capabilities.

The scalable, high-performance, open source, NoSQL database that makes handling huMONGOus data easy, just keeps getting better and more popular. It has been downloaded more than 4 million times according to Matt Asay, 10gen’s VP, Corporate Strategy. And that’s a lot of downloads given that it wasn't available until 2009.

And though 10gen isn’t able (a.k.a. “allowed”) to name all of the companies who are using it, some that are well known, easily recognizable and content-centric include MTV Networks (including Comedy Central, the Daily Show and Spike), foursquare, Disney, eBay, Cisco, Craigslist, EA, eBay, Ericsson, Forbes, Intuit, LexisNexis, McAfee, Salesforce.com, Shutterfly, Paypal, Telefonica, Fitch Ratings… we could go on. (Note: We came up with part of this list ourselves; 10gen did not provide all of the names.)