Welcome to that time of the year when we look back at what we've delivered to our users and community in the past year. Here's MongoDB's 2018, month by month - it's been a great year so let's start with...
January
The year started with the announcement of a new Go driver in development. Go is a popular language, used widely including inside MongoDB Inc, and we decided to start developing an official driver.
Meanwhile, the GUIs for MongoDB - Compass and Compass Community - were updated with new features including plugins, auto-complete, and a special read-only Compass. If you've not tried Compass yet, you've already spent this year missing out.
February
The big news for the second month of the year was the confirmation that MongoDB 4.0 would have multi-document transactions. The feature, the result of years of work within MongoDB, was already in beta and heading for launch later in the year.
March
It's nice to know you are wanted and in March, Stack Overflow's survey told us that MongoDB was the most wanted database amongst its users. It's nice to know but we always want to get better...
April
And in April we added a small feature to Atlas which made life easier for everyone. Be gone long connection strings and hello new connection string with SRV and the magic of DNS.
May
A landmark for us as we celebrated MongoDB becoming one thousand strong around the world and we're growing faster every day! Meanwhile, Compass carried on improving with the addition of an Aggregation Pipeline Builder which helps you harness one of MongoDB's most powerful query options.
June
It's June and it's time for MongoDB World 2018. As well as a great conference there was plenty to enjoy at home including the release of MongoDB 4.0 which as our CTO says is "the best database for modern applications".
We also brought free cloud monitoring for MongoDB into the new release, brought the MongoDB Atlas free tier to Google Cloud Platform and rolled out our BI connector as a managed option on MongoDB Atlas.
And that wasn't all. MongoDB Stitch, the platform for your MongoDB Atlas applications, was officially made GA and MongoDB Mobile, a database for your devices and IoT systems, went into beta. Add to that MongoDB Atlas Enterprise that lets companies deploy to Atlas with an encryption-at-rest storage engine and bring-your-own-key management and get the most secure cloud database service anywhere.
The release of the MongoDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator as a beta offering was the icing on the MongoDB World cake, giving ops the ability to deploy MongoDB and OpsManager or Cloud Manager into Kubernetes clusters; yet another place you can run MongoDB!
July
For companies who need their global data running fast and local MongoDB Atlas Global Clusters were launched at the start of July. Using MongoDB zone sharding, you are able to direct database traffic to the nearest global shard.
Connections are what its all about in IT and in July we made the MongoDB BI Connector talk ODBC natively letting Excel, Tableau and PowerBI tap directly and easily into the wisdom of MongoDB data.
August
With MongoDB 4.0's multi-document transactions out in the wild, the drivers began arriving with transaction support. In August, the latest MongoDB Java driver got support for the new transactions.
September
Over on the MongoDB cloud, we announced that all users could use the MongoDB Atlas Data Explorer. That meant even free users could make use of the "at-your-fingertips" queries, filters, document copying and editing from their web browser.
October
The MongoDB Connector for Apache Spark was certified by Cloudera and Azure Databricks this month so more users could put Spark to work doing data science with MongoDB.
This month also saw the introduction of the new MongoDB SSPL - Server Side Public Licence. This new license is designed to ensure MongoDB is being developed for you today and tomorrow. If you use MongoDB in your application, don't worry, MongoDB is free (as in speech) as it has ever been.
Also, October saw the millionth registration to MongoDB University with Guillermo Ulises Lo Coco from Tenerife in the Canary Islands of Spain signing up for the free courses on MongoDB Basics and New Features and Tools in MongoDB 4.0.
November
Talking about free, the Atlas free tier completed the triple by arriving on MongoDB Atlas for Microsoft's Azure cloud. Now you can try out MongoDB on AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Azure for not a cent (or penny). MongoDB Mobile went GA this month and was joined by the beta release of MongoDB Mobile Sync, a solution for keeping databases in sync with an Atlas database if they go far away, deep underground or just plain offline.
December
MongoDB Charts, which lets you turn your data into splendid visualizations arrived as a beta on MongoDB Atlas. That means it's easier than ever to turn data into a data source and then into a dazzling dashboard. December also saw the beta launch of MongoDB Stitch Hosting which adds serving static web content to the list of things Stitch can do for you.
And as the year draws to a close, we return to where we started. The Official MongoDB Go Driver is now feature-complete and available for beta testing. So, if you are a Go developer looking for something to do over the Christmas break...
The most important thing is that we couldn't have done any of this without you, our customers and community, and your valuable feedback into what you need from modern databases and applications. Thank you for your participation! Now, onwards into 2019!