MongoDB 4.0 To Offer Multi-Document ACID Transactions

The next version of the MongoDB database management system will feature transactions, which the company claims will remove the need for organisations to choose a traditional relational database.

MongoDB 4.0 is due for general release in the summer, and it will offer ACID transactions for the first time ever.

This addition essentially means that those developers working with transactions in traditional relational databases, can now rather opt for the forthcoming MongoDB 4.0, which is currently in a beta program.

Transaction Support

There is little doubt that databases and database management has traditionally been one of the last highly specialised arenas in the tech industry.

But as data volumes get larger and larger, everyone wants to use their data more and get more value out of their data.

This has seen a wave of organisations moving from traditional databases to databases such as the open source NoSQL MongoDB.

“By adding the highest data guarantees of ACID to MongoDB’s performance, scalability and flexibility, no-one should ever be forced to choose a relational database again,” said the New York-based firm.

“MongoDB has always been an easy choice due to the flexibility and power of its document model, and now the addition of transactions makes MongoDB the best choice for the broadest set of use cases,” it said.

The MongoDB multi-document transactions will familiar to those developers already accustomed to working with transactions in relational databases. It will provide a globally consistent view of data across replica sets and enforce all-or-nothing execution to maintain data integrity.

“MongoDB disrupted the database industry by introducing the document model, a more intuitive, flexible and performant way for developers to work with data, designed from the ground up for scalability and resiliency,” said Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO of MongoDB.

“As a result, MongoDB was widely adopted by developers worldwide and became the most popular modern database,” said Ittycheria. “With this announcement, developers have the peace of mind of using a modern general purpose database that can literally address any use case, and do it faster and cheaper than a traditional database.”

The firm said that it has been developing transactions ever since its acquisition of the WiredTiger storage engine three years ago.

It has taken a “substantial engineering effort” to develop transactions within MongoDB, but now it can offer consistency and durability guarantees, as well as a global logical clock, refactored cluster metadata management and other features.

Relational Databases

“Adding ACID transactions support to MongoDB removes any hesitation for developers when selecting a database,” said Eliot Horowitz, CTO and cofounder, MongoDB. “They no longer need to sacrifice speed of development over concerns that they might need transactions in a future application.”

That said, relational databases still does have its supporters.

Last year for example Google announced a public beta release of Cloud Spanner, which it touted as the ‘first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable.’

Google apparently developed Spanner as alternative to MySQL, which previously ran many of the search engine’s products.

Quiz: Think you know all about the database market?