Top 4 Reasons to Use MongoDB 8.0

We’re excited to announce that MongoDB 8.0—the newest version of the world’s most popular document database, used by millions of developers and more than 50,000 customers around the world—is now generally available. MongoDB 8.0 builds upon MongoDB’s industry-leading capabilities to provide significant performance improvements, reduced costs, and greater ease of use, from local deployments to globally distributed applications at enterprise scale.

Developers have long loved building with MongoDB, so we've ensured that 8.0 kept the bar extremely high for developer usability. MongoDB 8.0 was also built to exceed our customers’ most stringent security, resiliency, availability, and performance requirements, and is the most impressive version of MongoDB yet. MongoDB 8.0 gives customers the strongest possible foundation for building a wide range of applications, now and in the future.

Jim Scharf, Chief Technology Officer, MongoDB

For MongoDB 8.0, we focused our engineering efforts around four core goals:

• Optimize performance for the widest variety of applications

• Deliver innovative encryption to unlock new use cases

• Reduce costs and increase scale with rapid and intuitive horizontal scaling for high availability

• Ensure resilience for unexpected application demand

So how do these goals actually benefit teams as they build and manage applications? We’ll start by looking at why you should use MongoDB 8.0.

Whether you’re a seasoned MongoDB veteran or are new to the database, MongoDB 8.0 is a great foundation for new applications and supercharging existing ones alike. Version 8.0 combines the things developers love most about MongoDB—like an intuitive and cohesive developer experience, support for a broad set of use cases, and operational ease of use—with unparalleled performance improvements.

Top reasons to switch to MongoDB 8.0

1. MongoDB 8.0 is over 30% faster than before

As the data applications generate and use grows, minor inefficiencies can lead to disproportionate increases in infrastructure costs. Because many customers primarily interact with businesses through their applications, poor or inconsistent application performance can lead to customer unhappiness, lost opportunities, and declines in revenue. So it’s imperative for organizations to ensure that their applications perform consistently well.

MongoDB 8.0 significantly improves performance by allowing applications to rapidly and efficiently query and transform data, with up to 36% better throughput. Architectural optimizations in MongoDB 8.0 have reduced memory usage and query times, and a combination of more efficient batch processing and optimizations has enabled 56% faster bulk writes and 20% faster concurrent writes during data replication. Additionally, optimizations in MongoDB 8.0 mean the database can handle higher volumes of time series data and perform operations over 200% faster—with lower resource usage and costs.

2. MongoDB 8.0 is more secure than ever

Data protection and security are essential. With the increasing complexity and volume of data being transmitted, stored, and processed across environments, safeguarding sensitive information with robust encryption is more critical than ever. Organizations must protect their data throughout its lifecycle—in transit over networks, at rest where it is stored, and while it’s in use for querying and processing. However, it can be challenging to encrypt data while it is queried and processed, leaving data vulnerable to exposure or exfiltration by malicious actors.

MongoDB Queryable Encryption is an industry-first innovation developed by the MongoDB Cryptography Research Group. It allows customers to encrypt sensitive data on the client side, store it securely as fully randomized encrypted data in the MongoDB database, and to run expressive queries on the encrypted data for processing.

MongoDB 8.0 now includes support for range queries—in addition to equality queries—to expand secure data retrieval with greater flexibility for common searches. With Queryable Encryption, the required data remains encrypted until it reaches an authorized end user using a customer-controlled decryption key—with no cryptography expertise required.

3. MongoDB 8.0 makes it cheaper and easier to scale

As organizations grow, their applications’ requirements tend to evolve. For example, scaling to support millions of users can be challenging for organizations that originally designed their applications for thousands of users. This is because implementing architectural changes in production applications can involve significant effort that can be costly and time-consuming.

With MongoDB 8.0, horizontal scaling is now faster and easier, and at a lower cost. With horizontal scaling, applications can scale beyond the limits of traditional database resources by splitting data across multiple servers known as shards—without having to pre-provision increasing amounts of compute resources for a single server. New sharding capabilities in MongoDB 8.0 distribute data across shards up to 50 times faster and at up to 50% lower cost to get started.

4. MongoDB 8.0 gives you more control to help your applications run smoothly

End-users expect consistent application experiences, even during periods of high demand and usage spikes. Organizations without a highly durable operational database risk poor customer experiences, with lagging application behavior (or even downtime) during times of high demand.

MongoDB 8.0 provides greater control for teams optimizing database performance for unpredictable spikes in usage and sustained periods of high demand. MongoDB 8.0 includes new capabilities to set a default maximum time limit for running queries, to reject recurring types of problematic queries, and to set query settings to persist through events like database restarts. These capabilities help deliver consistent application behavior and high performance, irrespective of demand spikes or unexpected events.

Ready to try MongoDB 8.0?

If you are building a new application, the easiest way to get started with MongoDB 8.0 is by going to mongodb.com/try, where you can sign up for a free Atlas account, download the Community edition, and learn more about self-managing MongoDB with an Enterprise Advanced subscription.

If you are running a previous version of MongoDB, there are helpful upgrade tutorials for MongoDB Atlas and self-managed deployments. Additionally, documentation and expert help from the MongoDB professional services team are on hand.

If you have an existing application that is not currently using MongoDB as the database, check out the MongoDB Relational Migrator tool. Relational Migrator can help you map existing relational schemas to a MongoDB schema, perform data migrations, and convert existing relational queries, triggers, and stored procedures to work with MongoDB.

The MongoDB engineering and product teams listened attentively to developer feedback, and MongoDB 8.0 was built with developer usability—as well as security, durability, availability, and performance—top of mind. We’re excited for you to give it a try, and are sure you’ll enjoy the performance gains and other benefits of MongoDB 8.0!